FYI: GOP & Elephant

[Bapopik at AOL.COM]

I should mention that the second riddle (four legs, three legs, two legs, one
leg--"Man") is not American and supposedly goes back to the Greek legends.
...
My run for office ("Public Advocate") is going great. No one in the
Republican Party even responds. Not even one g*dd*mn e-mail. And it's not like there
are a lot of elected Republicans in Manhattan. There's just one (Mike
Bloomberg), and he was a Democrat.

FYI, here's the GOP (wrong, of course) and the elephant:

http://www.gop.com/About/Defaul
Origin of "GOP"

A favorite of headline writers, GOP dates back to the 1870s and '80s. The
abbreviation was cited in a New York Herald story on October 15, 1884; "' The
G.O.P. Doomed,' shouted the Boston Post.... The Grand Old Party is in condition
to inquire...."
But what GOP stands for has changed with the times. In 1875 there was a
citation in the Congressional Record referring to "this gallant old party," and ,
according to Harper's Weekly, in the Cincinnati Commercial in 1876 to "Grand
Old Party."
Perhaps the use of "the G.O.M." for Britain's Prime Minister William E.
Gladstone in 1882 as " the Grand Old Man" stimulated the use of GOP in the United
States soon after.
In early motorcar days, GOP took on the term "get out and push." During the
1964 presidential campaign, "Go-Party" was used briefly, and during the Nixon
Administration, frequent references to the "generation of peace" had happy
overtones. In line with moves in the '70s to modernize the party, Republican
leaders took to referring to the "grand old party," harkening back to a 1971 speech
by President Nixon at the dedication of the Eisenhower Republican Center in
Washington, D.C.
Indeed, the "grand old party" is an ironic term, since the Democrat Party was
organized some 22 years earlier in 1832.

http://www.gop.com/About/Default.aspx?Section=1
Origin of the Elephant

This symbol of the party was born in the imagination of cartoonist Thomas
Nast and first appeared in Harper's Weekly on November 7, 1874.
An 1860 issue of Railsplitter and an 1872 cartoon in Harper's Weekly
connected elephants with Republicans, but it was Nast who provided the party with its
symbol.
Oddly, two unconnected events led to the birth of the Republican Elephant.
James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald raised the cry of "Caesarism" in
connection with the possibility of a thirdterm try for President Ulysses S. Grant. The
issue was taken up by the Democratic politicians in 1874, halfway through
Grant's second term and just before the midterm elections, and helped disaffect
Republican voters.
While the illustrated journals were depicting Grant wearing a crown, the
Herald involved itself in another circulation-builder in an entirely different,
nonpolitical area. This was the Central Park Menagerie Scare of 1874, a
delightful hoax perpetrated by the Herald. They ran a story, totally untrue, that the
animals in the zoo had broken loose and were roaming the wilds of New York's
Central Park in search of prey.
Cartoonist Thomas Nast took the two examples of the Herald enterprise and put
them together in a cartoon for Harper's Weekly. He showed an ass (symbolizing
the Herald) wearing a lion's skin (the scary prospect of Caesarism)
frightening away the animals in the forest (Central Park). The caption quoted a
familiar fable: "An ass having put on a lion's skin roamed about in the forest and
amused himself by frightening all the foolish animals he met within his
wanderings."
One of the foolish animals in the cartoon was an elephant, representing the
Republican vote - not the party, the Republican vote - which was being
frightened away from its normal ties by the phony scare of Caesarism. In a subsequent
cartoon on November 21, 1874, after the election in which the Republicans did
badly, Nast followed up the idea by showing the elephant in a trap,
illustrating the way the Republican vote had been decoyed from its normal allegiance.
Other cartoonists picked up the symbol, and the elephant soon ceased to be the
vote and became the party itself: the jackass, now referred to as the donkey,
made a natural transition from representing the Herald to representing the
Democratic party that had frightened the elephant.
--From William Safire's New Language of Politics, Revised edition, Collier
Books, New York, 1972