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During an unusual stretch in United States history in which many of the candidates for national office, such as Donald Trump, Tim Walz, Joe Biden, Mike Pence, Mitt Romney, and George W. Bush, have been teetotalers, Kamala Harris is restoring American political tradition by finding joy in the bottle.

An oenophile, the California candidate is an ardent personal supporter of her home state’s famous wine industry, while also displaying habituated knowledge of European vintages. The owner of Washington’s Cork Wine Bar enthused in 2020:

“She can talk about different varietals. She can talk about differences between California oak and French oak…. She knows what she likes and doesn’t like, and knows why she doesn’t like it…. She does like her California wines, but she does have a great appreciation for Old World wines as well, because we don’t do domestic wines at Cork.”

We live in an era in which Americans seem more interested in the drinking habits of dead presidents like Ulysses S. Grant than of live contenders.

The first fifty years of American presidents were all hard drinkers by 21st-century standards, but not by the norms of their voters, who consumed remarkable amounts of whiskey.

At a tavern party during the Constitutional Convention in 1787, George Washington and 54 of his fellow officers from the crossing of the Delaware paid for 54 bottles of fortified Madeira, 22 bottles of fortified porter, 60 bottles of claret, and sundry beer, cider, and punch, at least 45 gallons of adult beverages, or 3.8 liters per officer and gentleman.

But the enterprising Washington probably came out ahead economically on booze over the course of his life because he also manufactured it. In the year he died, 1799, his Mount Vernon distillery sold almost 11,0000 gallons of whiskey.

In contrast, the aesthetic Thomas Jefferson was a connoisseur of the finest European wines, leaving a cellar at Monticello with thousands of bottles.

Jefferson’s Madeiras, a hearty wine from the Portuguese island that never goes bad, are still being auctioned off. A couple of decades ago, when I was reporting an article on Madeira, an amiable enthusiast invited me to Savannah, Georgia, to help him finish off his newly opened bottle once owned by the author of the Declaration of Independence. (I responded that was one of the nicest things anybody ever offered me, but he should share it with somebody with better taste buds than myself who could more fully appreciate the 200-year-old wine.)

This general tendency of Washington to make money while Jefferson spent money helps explain why George got so rich that he was able to free his slaves in his will, while the more conscience-stricken Tom was always too much in debt to manumit his collateral.

The entertaining website of the American Prohibition Museum in Savannah suggests that this distinction between the production of General Washington and the consumption of Mr. Jefferson, Esquire was fairly widespread among early presidents:

There seems to be a pattern with many of these presidents. The lawyer types make a lot of money and then snob out on elegant and exotic wines and liquors without making much themselves. The soldier types live more modestly, but are better equipped to make and sell their own liquor on the side. [James] Buchanan fits this profile. His successful law practice earned him a lot of money early on, and he was able to easily explore any fancy alcohols his tastes called for. Why make it when you can order the best around?

In the middle of the 19th century, America started to see light-drinking chief executives, such as the workaholic James K. Polk. Abraham Lincoln would slowly sip a drink to keep from discouraging his more party-hearty guests from enjoying their libations.

But that era also saw notoriously heavy drinkers like Buchanan, Franklin Pierce (perhaps the first president to be widely viewed by his contemporaries as suffering from an alcohol problem, he died of cirrhosis of the liver at age 64), Andrew Johnson (who was stumbling drunk at his vice presidential inauguration), and, of course, Grant.

Considering that Grant managed to win the Civil War, his reputation as an alcoholic might be overstated today. Grant had an unusual personality, the kind seen in the best NFL quarterbacks, that gets cooler when the bullets are flying fastest. The flip side of that was that when the pressure relented, Grant occasionally fell apart. Hence, Grant had a problem with binge-drinking when he was bored and missed his wife.

But the Civil War kept him busy, and his rise to the top job in the Army allowed Mrs. Grant to be with him more. He fell off the wagon a few times during the last two years of the war but was lucky that no crises occurred during his brief incapacitations.

Since the 1950s, the Nuclear Era has raised the alarming possibility that a crisis requiring presidential decision-making could break out at any time, day or night.

While John F. Kennedy drank mostly in moderation, his generally poor health led him to have Max Jacobson repeatedly shoot him up with Dr. Feelgood’s patent medicine combination of amphetamines, steroids, and much else. White House doctors finally got JFK to lay off his quack’s uppers, and he then performed calmly and prudently during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Lyndon Johnson was a heavy drinker, but, being a huge man, he believed that the more rounds of Cutty Sark, the more he could out-negotiate his counterparts.

Richard Nixon was a nervous, intense man who needed something to fall asleep. But he had little tolerance for alcohol. Aides recounted that one drink notably worsened his performance, and Nixon on three was a nightmare.

Pat Buchanan’s 2015 memoir The Greatest Comeback, of working for Nixon when he was an attorney in private practice rebuilding his popularity with the GOP by campaigning tirelessly for Republican congressional candidates in the successful 1966 midterm election, depicts Nixon as sober from dawn to the end of the evening, but sometimes getting blasted on the flight home.

If you are a former vice president who takes limos everywhere, late-night drinking isn’t a problem. But Nixon’s midnight indulgence became troublesome as president, especially in the crisis of October 1973 when the stress of Watergate left him too drunk to discuss the perilous Yom Kippur War with the British prime minister.

Journalists love penning articles like this one on historical presidents’ adventures with alcohol, but we treat current politicians’ drinking more gingerly. (In Britain, where libel laws are stricter, Fleet Street uses the phrase “tired and emotional” as a euphemism for a parliamentarian’s sozzledness.)

And the American public doesn’t seem too interested in picking up on the media’s clues. For example, in 2015 ABC News interviewed the New York Times reporter who’d shadowed Hillary Clinton’s failed 2008 run for the Democratic nomination:

Covering Clinton, what is one thing that has surprised you about her?

Amy Chozick: “Hmm. She likes to drink. We were on the campaign trail in 2008 and the press thought she was just taking shots to pander to voters in Pennsylvania. Um, no.”

That seemed funny to me, but Democrats didn’t notice.

So they nominated Hillary in 2016…and she lost to teetotaler Donald Trump.