MANIFEST DESTINY

To anyone who knows this joint, Chappaqua is dripping with US presidents. It seems that everywhere you look, you see another national leader. I predict presidential libraries will soon outnumber restaurants in this small, cozy hamlet on the banks of the Saw Mill River. History has played strange tricks on this town, and there seems to be no end in sight.

Our favorite son, Liberal Republican Horace Greeley, the famed editor of the New York Tribune (who urged people to follow their manifest destiny and head west–beyond Ossining), ran for the presidency of the United States against the Radical Republican incumbent, Ulysses S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln's victorious general-turned-president.

Despite the Democrats throwing their support for him, Horace Greeley lost the presidency in a landslide in 1872, but lost by only slightly more popular votes than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney lost by in 2000.

Greeley had married--get this--Mary Cheney, who then became Mary Cheney Greeley. Mary Cheney Greeley had medical problems and died before her husband’s electoral votes could even be counted. Therefore, we old-timers in Chappaqua still consider Greeley the honorary winner against the hard-drinking and ill-mannered ex-Civil War general.

Soon thereafter, Greeley was defrauded of his investments and lost control of his beloved New York Tribune to Whitelaw Reed, the owner of the New York Herald. Greeley died in Pleasantville saying, "You son of a bitch, you stole my newspaper."

William Jefferson Clinton landed on the shores of the Saw Mill soon after serving 8 years as our 42nd president. Like Horace Greeley, Bill Clinton had supported liberal policies towards the settlers who, by 1992, were reasonably well-settled.

While he was president, Bill called for an end to racial discrimination, reformed welfare, prosecuted a successful war, and in turn, was prosecuted over his veracity in non-job related indiscretions. Ultimately, he was found not-guilty by the Senate. Bill left a sizable budget surplus to the man who lost the popular vote to his vice president, "Get out of Mary Cheney's father's house" Al Gore -- but who won anyway. I hope I'm not confusing you.

Anyway, Bill Clinton, of course, had been married to First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, who quickly became the first Arkansas woman to win statewide office in New York, by winning her Senate seat. In fact, she was the first woman from New York to win statewide as well. During her first term, Hillary started a dialogue between liberal-leaning downstaters, and the more conservative upstaters, finding the common ground that paved the way for her landslide reelection victory in 2006.

Now, Hillary has declared she's in the presidential race to win. With more working candidates than working voting machines, Hillary will have a tough fight ahead, but many in Greeley's home town think her success, providence. For some time now, our impressive parades have attracted not only stray dogs, but the national media as well.

Winding down King Street, past the Greeley homestead and onto Greeley Avenue, one gets a sense of history in the making. There, ahead of the Cub Scouts and Brownies -- the tubas and the fire trucks -- the veterans and the ambulance corps -- quite possibly marches the first woman president of the United States!

Horace Greeley would have been pleased to know that the souls he sent west not only survived life on the frontier, but prospered. It is fitting that, 128 years later, two of presidential caliber would return from the territories to carry on his presidential dreams. It was manifest in our destiny.