When President Grover Cleveland left the presidency in 1889, the 22nd president of the United States had no designs to seek a second term. Four years later, on March 4, 1893, Cleveland stood at the East Portico of the Capitol, swearing the same oath he had recited eight years prior.
Cleveland became the 24th president battered and bruised, but unbroken: He’d taken on Tammany Hall, survived scandal, and overcome an embarrassing defeat in the 1888 election. Cleveland, the only Democratic president of the Reconstruction era, believed his administration’s policies were vindicated by the intermittent four years. The American people appeared to feel the same, as Cleveland’s popular vote margin of victory, about 400,000 votes, was the largest since President Ulysses S. Grant’s reelection in 1872.
More than 130 years on, a similar story seems to be unfolding: Former…
