Rick: Funny you should mention Harding. I am just reading Irving Stone’s mini-classic They Also Ran (mine is the 1966 edition), about the men (other than sitting Presidents) who ran for President and lost. It’s the most ferociously anti-Harding book I’ve encountered:

If the country had set out on a treasure hunt to find the worst possible candidate for the office of the presidency, it is hardly conceivable that they could have done better than Warren G. Harding …

Stone leaves you thinking that nobody could have been that bad. Talk about polemical history. He also has an interesting way with words. Of James Middleton Cox, Harding’s 1920 opponent (one of only two journalists to be defeated for the presidency — bonus points for readers who can name the other one), Stone tells us that: “He was not fond of boning in school …” Really?