The Happy Warrior, the Honorable governor of New York, Alfred E. Smith, responds to a critic who suggested that his being a Catholic must compromise his loyalty to the United States. This was of course in 1928, when Smith was running for President against Herbert Hoover. Now that I think of it, I do not believe that we have had this state of affairs since then -- one thoroughly fine human being running against another thoroughly fine human being. The best we've done since, it seems to me, was Stevenson-Eisenhower and Mondale-Reagan; I am speaking of them as men, not as politicians.
The letter here has so personal a touch, I must believe that Smith wrote it right through. I'm posting it here not for the arguments themselves, but for the literacy, the reasonableness, the care in argumentation, and the style. I tell people that I encounter this ALL THE TIME, because of one of my hobbies, which is to collect bound volumes (usually six months' worth; for a couple of journals, one year) of old all-purpose journals: The Century Magazine (my favorite), Harper's, Scribners', and a few others. It isn't just that Mr. Obama or Mr. Romney or Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Biden WOULD not say these things. They might well say a few of them, if they were brought to their attention, and had somebody to explain to them what they meant. But they COULD not say them. They didn't have or don't have the linguistic sophistication.
It's as when Fred Flintstone in the old cartoon got hit on the head with a bowling ball, and lost his few wits for a while, twiddling his lips and saying, "Tell me a story, Mommy!" -- except that this has happened to a whole country, and it isn't going away.