Drew,
Grover Cleveland gets a pretty bad rap for a guy who served as such a principled president.
Republicans ignore him because he was a Democrat. Democrats ignore him because his policies remind them of modern-day Republicans.
In their Patriot’s History of the United States, Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen label Cleveland a “Presidential Giant.”
Cleveland’s image has enjoyed a revival in the late twentieth century because of new interest by conservative and libertarian scholars who see in him one of the few presidents whose every action seemed to be genuinely dictated by Constitutional principle.
For example, the book cites his veto of a bill that would have provided millions of dollars in loans for midwestern farmers to buy corn seed. Labeling it “a prime act of political courage in that he had everything to gain by signing it and nothing to lose,” Schweikart and Allen say Cleveland exercised the veto because he said the Constitution sanctioned no federal power to provide the loans.
Of course, there is one part of Cleveland’s record that should appeal to fans of Bill Clinton: Cleveland might have fathered a child out of wedlock. He never denied the charge. Cleveland’s opponents used the campaign slogan: “Ma, Ma, Where’s my Pa?”
