The Very Basic Basics of How and Why We Elect Presidents as We Do.

Well, the idea that the Founders would have been shocked, shocked, by a Speaker of the House ripping up a State of the Union as a president was finishing it is simply wrong. Colonial and Early Republic politics were very rough and tumble affairs. Violent, bawdy, full of bribery . . . even the terribly upright George Washington used booze, lots of it, to bribe voters when he ran for a seat in the Virginia House of Burgesses.

So they expected things to be rough . . . but they were also building a nation and they wanted to force the politicians to build a nation even as they pursued their own self-interests. In an era where one congressman tried to brain another congressman with fire tongs in the middle of a contentious debate and where a senator was caught bargaining with the Spanish and the British to give away about half the country, the people who wrote the Constitution came up with an ingenuous solution. They forced the selection of the president into narrow avenues, constraining those who actually had the right to elect a president by giving them few opportunities to engage their worst appetites.