"Yelping at the scent of a wounded fox, the Whigs threw everything into the campaign of 1840. It is still remembered as one of the great campaigns, and yet "great" seems too majestic a word for what was basically the cynical triumph of advertising over substance. After nominating the elderly military hero William Henry Harrison, the Whigs fell into paroxysms of excitement over the rumor that their candidate lived in a log cabin and had a fondness for hard cider. In fact, neither claim was true. Harrison was born into a considerably more substantial dwelling, an old brick mansion on the James River in Virginia. But that did not matter in the least. When in doubt, print the legend- and the image of an impoverished boy running around a log cabin entered the popular folklore, well before Lincoln ever figured out that modesty was a path to power. The great irony, of course, is that the log-cabin-and-hard-cider slogan was much truer of van Buren's life than his opponent's, and that he was being outsmarted by a ruthless opposition that had mastered all of his techniques. But no one was interested in the truth in 1840- only in the result."