"availability."

It is the product of the convergence of two things--the fact of
democracy as indicated by the election of a First Magistrate by a method
already frankly plebiscitary, and the effect of a Party System,
becoming, as all Party Systems must become if they endure, at once
increasingly rigid and increasingly unreal.

The aim of party managers--necessarily professionals--was to get their
party nominee elected. But the conditions under which they worked were
democratic. They could not, as such professionals can in an oligarchy
like ours, simply order the electors to vote for any nincompoop who was
either rich and ambitious enough to give them, the professionals, money
in return for their services, or needy and unscrupulous enough to be
their hired servant. They were dealing with a free people that would not
have borne such treatment. They had to consider as a practical problem
for what man the great mass of the party would most readily and
effectively vote. And it was often discovered that while the nomination
of an acknowledged "leader" led, through the inevitable presence (in a
democracy) of conflicts and discontents within the party, to the loss of
votes, the candidate most likely to unite the whole party was one
against whom no one had any grudge and who simply stood for the
"platform" which was framed in a very democratic fashion by the people
themselves voting in their "primaries." When this system is condemned
and its results held up to scorn, it should be remembered that among
other effects it is certainly responsible for the selection of Abraham
Lincoln.

Polk was not a Lincoln, but he was emphatically an "available"
candidate, and he won, defeating Clay, to whom the Whigs had once more
reverted, by a formidable majority. He found himself confronted with two
pressing questions of foreign policy. During the election the Democrats
had played the "Oregon" card for all it was worth, and the new President
found himself almost committed to the "forty-seven-forty-or-fight"
position. But the practical objections to a war with England on the
Oregon dispute were soon found to be just as strong as Calhoun had
represented them to be. Moreover, the opportunity presented itself for a
war at once much more profitable and much less perilous than such a
contest was likely to prove, and it was obvious that the two wars could
not be successfully undertaken at once.

The independence of Texas had been in some sort r