Author-historian visits LR, reviews 4 historic elections

Presidential elections aren't just "funny sideshows" but are important because they reflect what is occurring in America, an author told a University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service audience in Little Rock on Monday evening.

Margaret O'Mara, who is an associate professor of history at the University of Washington, is the author of Pivotal Tuesdays: Four Elections that Shaped the Twentieth Century.

O'Mara's book examines the presidential elections of 1912, 1932, 1968 and 1992.

"The stories from these past elections I profile, I want to use to shed some light on some of the big questions that are emanating from our politics today and to make us realize how important it is to pay attention, to participate, to have your voice heard through voting, through activism because who gets elected matters," O'Mara said, speaking to a crowd of about 80 people at the school.

"I wanted to choose four moments that would reflect a broader tapestry of American history," said O'Mara, who is a visiting scholar this academic year at Stanford University. "That would reflect economic change and social change and cultural change."

The election of 1912 pitted Democrat Woodrow Wilson against Progressive candidate Theodore Roosevelt, who had served as the Republican president from 1901 to 1909; incumbent Republican President William Howard Taft; and Socialist Eugene Debs.

Wilson won.

The 1932 election featured Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt against incumbent Republican President Herbert Hoover, with Roosevelt winning. Republican Richard Nixon bested Democrat Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 election. American Independent candidate George Wallace finished third in that election.

In 1992, Democrat Bill Clinton won the White House over incumbent Republican President George H.W. Bush and Independent Ross Perot.

Three takeaways from the elections in the book are that new media and new technologies shape how to run and win, that outsiders gain traction when voters believe established institutions have failed them, and that electoral outcomes aren't a swinging pendulum between left and right but reflect a shifting center, O'Mara said.

Clinton School student Anne Haley, in introducing O'Mara, said that "presidential elections ... provoke and inspire a massive movement of ordinary citizens in the political system."

"No matter how frustrated or disinterested voters might be about politics and government, every four years on the first Tuesday in November the attention of the nation and the world focuses on the candidates, the contest and the issues," she said. "Our partisan electoral process allows for a messy, jumbled, raucous nation to come together as a slightly more perfect union."

An Arkansas native, O'Mara was a staff member on the Clinton campaign in 1992 and served in the Clinton administration.

She is the daughter of Caroline and the Rev. Joel Pugh, who is the former dean of Little Rock's Trinity Episcopal Cathedral.

Metro on 11/18/2015

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