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Date:
Tue, 28 Jul 2009 12:13:50 -0400
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Here's all I got, Harold. It's a paragraph from a short piece I wrote
called "Is He the Anti-Doughnut President?" just after Obama was elected.
He [Twain] must have forged his respect for the vote as a youth. As a
fourteen year-old in 1850, he belonged to the “Cadets of Temperance,” whose
officers, during elections, bought off votes with doughnuts until the
“Anti-Doughnut Party” was formed to end the corruption. Years later, when
Twain decided that he could not vote for either William Jennings Bryan
(because a friend told him Bryant was bad on finance) or William McKinley
(because McKinley was an imperialist and Twain, well, not so much), he
boasted: “I’ve got that vote, and it’s clean yet, ready to be used when you
form your ‘Anti-Doughnut Party’ that will want only the best men for
offices, no matter what party they belong to and which will solve all your
political problems.”
See you in Elmira.
Ben
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