Puck's Presidential Possibilities No. II: Old-Man-Ready-to-Be-Struck

Frederick Opper depicts ex-President Benjamin Harrison as a comically desperate office-seeker, wedged into a chimney stack on a rooftop and bristling with lightning rods. Each rod is labeled with a credential Harrison hoped would attract the 1896 Republican nomination: Jingo Record, G.A.R. War Record, Grandson of His Grandfather (mocking his reliance on William Henry Harrison's fame), Reciprocity, Grandfather's Hat, Vigorous Foreign Policy, A Cheap Coat Makes a Cheap Man, and Paternalism. The lightning bolt he courts is labeled Republican Presidential Nomination. Opper's Harrison is pudgy, vain, and faintly ridiculous—a man whose entire political identity is a bundle of borrowed or hollow claims, sitting passively and waiting for glory to strike him rather than earning it. The joke cuts at Harrison's reputation as a one-term president elevated by dynasty rather than distinction.