Invisible Man 
The timeless aura of Plain Speakin’ & Brisk Walking Harry Truman claims another victim.
The 2008 campaign has already featured John Mccain wistfully recalling halcyon days when Truman strolled the capitol, accompanied by a single Secret Service agent.
Barack Obama has topped that on a visit to the Independence shrine, imagining Truman did it with no security.
“The thing that I envy most about Truman was that when he was in the White House, he could go out and take a walk. He could put on that fedora and take a stroll, without someone following himâ€
Obama had better watch his back. While he hit the Truman Memorial Building, and Truman’s home, Obama skipped the Truman Library, making the Library Board Chairman all huffy.
Trumanesque or Trumanish? 
On to Buffalo! 
William McKinley’s last use in a contemporary campaign was Karl Rove’s mad scheme to present George W. Bush as the Big Mc of our generation, achieving solid Republican rule by persuading the scruffies to vote against their interests.
It worked with Bush, at least as far as the minstrel show 2000 campaign. It might again, but seems twice-musty for the already age-inflicted John McCain. The fighting Arizonan made the comparison anyway to USATODAY, dismissing Barack Obama as the new boy orator:
“If it was simply style, William Jennings Bryan would have been president.”
Gold Standard References 
The Gold Dust Twins 
The Bush Administration goes out as they ruled, flailing madly about and unable to keep their stories straight on items large and small.
Today’s sign of their decline: the partial collapse of a Bush fundraiser for the McCain campaign. In McCain’s hometown.
Ticket sales were bad, protesters loomed, so the thing shrank from the Phoenix Convention Center to a private home.
The White House made clear there was nothing to see here:
“A White House official said the event was being moved because the McCain campaign prefers private fundraisers and it is Bush administration policy to have events in public venues open to the media.”
A brisk dip into the past quickly found multiple Bush private, closed events.
Where It All Went Wrong? 
A perennial feature every campaign season is the release of genealogies supposedly demonstrating which kings, past presidents and vaguely familiar names 
presidential candidates are related to.
A lot of the work is done by genealogy hobbyists, sometimes assisted by the candidate’s own wild-ass claims. John McCain was recently called out for a bogus claim of descent from Robert The Bruce.
Hunt To Kill 
And now Richard Nixon is nominated for historical orphan-hood.
A long and lustrous line is shown for Nixon on Genealogy.com, but a critic hopes to chop it off in the 18th Century. Will Johnson says Genealogy.com grafted Nixon onto a family tree he has no business in.
Getting down in these weeds leads you to questions like: “The 1st and 2nd Baronet of Burton Agnes: dead-enders?”
“…the extinction of the baronetcy proves that neither Sir Henry 1st Baronet, nor Sir Henry 2nd Baronet had any surviving male- line issue. i.e. brothers, sons, nephews in the male line…[It] also disconnects Richard Nixon from this family. His ancestor, if he was indeed his ancestor at all, Samuel Griffith said-to-be “of Wigmore” who died in Maryland in 1717, does not belong to this family. “
If Nixon’s Genealogy.com ancestry held up he would be some sort of cousin to McCain and Obama . They are all supposed to be relatives of King Edward 1, famous for invading Scotland and expelling the Jews from England.
Father of Our Country 
Family Ties 
The Nixon family has long enjoyed a special relationship with African Americans.
And now a Nixon daughter endorses Obama!
The Nixon Library Feud continued by other means! 
