Cleveland was poorly prepared for the White House. Horace White, who had moved from Chicago and was editor of the New York Evening Post, interviewed him and found his grasp of national issues “extremely defective.” The New York Tribune’s Charles Nordhoff thought he was “curiously ignorant of federal questions and politics.” Vague promises of good government had won him office, but he would have to transform promises into policy and, Nordhoff wrote, he was “bound to have a troublesome time.”
