Romney as Secretary of State Is Old Tradition Of Giving the Job to Losing Candidates

Press reports mounted on Saturday night that President-elect Donald Trump will soon tap 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney to be secretary of state.

Romney used some strong language to describe Trump throughout the year. He endorsed various opponents of Trump's during the GOP nomination battle this year and then refused to support him in November.

So the thought of the former Massachusetts governor in the senior Cabinet position under a “President Trump” is difficult to imagine, to say the least.

But it actually shouldn’t be. The appointment as secretary of state of a losing former nominee for President or a rival for nomination to the new President is a very old tradition in American politics.

In the four-way presidential election of 1824, neither top-finishers Andrew Jackson nor John Quincy Adams secured a majority of the Electoral College. With the election thrown into the U.S. House of Representatives, the third-place finisher, Speaker of the House Henry Clay, threw his support to second-place finisher Adams and made him president.

Adams subsequently named Clay secretary of state, leading an angry Jackson to denounce the appointment as a “corrupt bargain.” Even after he won the presidency in 1828, Jackson never forgave Clay or Adams for what he felt was cheating him out of the office four years before.

In 1860, President-elect Abraham Lincoln turned to the man he upset for the Republican nomination, New York Sen. William Seward, and made him secretary of state.

Barack Obama, a huge fan of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals” that spelled out the story of Seward’s appointment, did the same thing in ’08 when he named as secretary of state the front-runner he upset for the Democratic nomination: Hillary Clinton.

From 1888 to 1920, three losing nominees for president were named secretary of state four years after missing out on the White House: Republicans James G. Blaine in 1888 and Charles Evan Hughes in 1920, and Democrat William Jennings Bryan in 1912.

After Hughes, the tradition of secretary of state as “consolation prize” for losing presidential candidates faded. But it lives today with 2004 nominee John Kerry, who holds the job today under Obama.