Millard, Dissed Again

Uh oh, the upcoming Paul Finkelman biography of Millard Fillmore looks like it's going to be a simplistic hatchet job. Amazon has posted an excerpt from the beginning of the book, and it's full of nonsense and snide innuendo. Let's start with this; my comments are in brackets:

Millard Fillmore, who became president after Taylor's death, was inexperienced and virtually unknown when he was nominated for vice president at the 1848 Whig convention. [Uh, he served four terms in Congress, rising to become Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee; alot more experience that a certain Mr. Lincoln later had.] He was born in poverty in central New York, poorly schooled as a child, and largely self-educated after that. [Notice the snarky "poorly schooled". Again one might say the same about Lincoln.] He achieved a comfortable middle-class status and struggled to fit in with men who were better educated, culturally more sophisticated, and more socially adept than he. [More snarkiness. Millard didn't raise himself up by his bootstraps to better himself and achieve success. His goal, apparently, was to become a self-satisfied bourgeois fat-cat - if he weren't such a socially inept dolt. Imagine Abe being described this way.] Moving to Buffalo, he practiced law and entered politics at age twenty-eight, serving three terms in the state legislature and later four terms in Congress. He was an unsuccessful candidate for governor of New York in 1844, but in 1847 he was elected state comptroller - an important but hardly a major office. [What happened to the Ways and Means Committee? And what state-wide office did Abe hold?] A year later, this obscure politician was nominated to run for vice president alongside General Taylor. [So obscure he was nominated more or less by acclamation after his name was suggested.]

Pathetic rubbish.