On the presidential campaign trail in 1908, a man at the front of a crowd hurled a cabbage at Republican candidate William Howard Taft. He missed, despite the fact that Taft, who won the election, was a huge target, weighing around 300 pounds. The soon-to-be president coolly shot back: “I see that one of my adversaries has lost his head.” (Most likely this widely-told tale is apocryphal, but nonetheless cute.)
The chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Ken Martin, lost his head in early July, tossing his mobile phone at the desk of a junior aide. Why he upbraided a lowly employee remains a mystery, but it nearly cost Martin his job. The incident prompted a complaint to the human resources department. He survived with a slap on the wrist, in part, as the New York Times helpfully pointed out, because it was unclear “how aggressively the phone was tossed.”
