First Ladies on the Stump

The practice of wives campaigning fell out of fashion until it was revived by Ida McKinley who was sent out on the campaign trail by Mark Hanna the Karl Rove of his day. Mr. Hanna devised the “front porch campaign” where Governor McKinley rested on his porch and bantered once a day with reporters while surrogates went out to campaign among the masses. Ida McKinley loved to meet the people and enjoyed campaigning swings throughout most of the United States. The best part about these trips was the return sex she would get from the Governor who was a somewhat indolent man but was a great reader, scholar and a cunning linguist. In a strange twist of fate, President McKinley was also assassinated at the Pan-American World’s Fair in Buffalo, New York by an anarchist named Leon Czolgosz. The police of the day were very much in favor of profiling and were watching all immigrants with beards and more than six consonants in the their names but missed Mr. Czolgosz as he traveled under his mother’s maiden name of Nieman. In fact the last reported words of President McKinley when he expired on his deathbed was “Nieman.”
(First Ladies on the Stump by Doris Kearns Goodwin, St. Martins Press).