Would you check out this sweet poster from the Library of Congress!? Okay, refresher: There was this big prez election in 1840 between Harrison (Whig) and Van Buren (Dem). Super contentious. Democrats tried to paint Harrison as an out-of-touch geezer who would rather "sit in his log cabin and drink hard cider" than do presidential-type things. I guess Harrison bee-lined out of the army before the War of 1812 and his opponents used that in their negative campaigns -- saying that he wasn't up-to-stuff presidential material, etc. One newspaper said, "Give him a barrel of hard cider, and ... a pension of two thousand [dollars] a year... and ... he will sit the remainder of his days in his log cabin."
The real kicker here is that the hard cider image HELPED (I mean really, how could it not!?) and Harrison campaigned his ass off, won office, gave the longest campaign victory speech in history in the freezing cold (it was like two hours long) and then he died of pneumonia a month later.
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