Why Obama is not first ‘imposter’ president and won’t be the last

One American president’s legitimacy was questioned because he was accused of wearing women’s underwear.

Another’s qualifications were questioned because he got drunk at an inaugural ball.

A third president didn’t belong in office because critics said his rich daddy stole the election.

A recent CNN poll revealed that one out of four Americans doubt that President Obama is a citizen. Many are “birthers” who believe he is an illegitimate president because he wasn’t born in this country.

But historians say Americans have long accused their presidents of being illegitimate officeholders for all sorts of dark, and bizarre, reasons.

“Heavens, where do I start?” says David Crockett, an associate professor of political science at Trinity University in Texas.

“No one wants to admit that they got spanked in an election contest. It’s always nicer to think the opponent somehow cheated the system. So yes — Obama wasn’t born here, Bush stole the election, Clinton won only because Ross Perot screwed up Bush’s [the elder’s] chances, Bush the elder won only because he demagogued Willie Horton. … I could go back further.”

You can go back to the 19th century, where calling a president illegitimate was a common — and often nasty — practice, says Thomas Alan Schwartz, a presidential historian at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.

President John Tyler was known as “His Accidency” because in 1841 he became the first president to assume office due to the death of his predecessor.

Rutherford B. Hayes was dubbed “His Fraudulency” because he assumed office after losing the popular vote in 1876 in a disputed election that he won by one electoral vote.

Though questioning a president’s legitimacy is common, it can turn dangerous, Schwartz says.

Foes accused Thomas Jefferson, our third president, of not being a legitimate American because of his foreign ties as well. They said he was too French — he spoke French and had a French cook.

They also said he had a slave mistress (a charge that a DNA analysis later suggested might be true), Crockett says.

Some other presidential “imposters” included Martin Van Buren, who was accused of not being fit for office because he allegedly wore a woman’s corset, Crockett says.

Some claims of presidential illegitimacy rested on nothing but open dislike of the man in the Oval Office.

Theodore Roosevelt deemed his successor, William Howard Taft, illegitimate because he didn’t like the man or his policies.
“Teddy Roosevelt called Taft a fathead,” Crockett says.

“On the extreme side, it encourages nut cases to take the law in their own hand.”