Today, Philip Terzian has a column on the similarity between Obama and Thomas Dewey in 1948. I hadn’t thought of this before but it makes some sense. Republicans hated Roosevelt and were desperate to get the White House back after 16 years. They had just taken control of Congress after 14 years in the wilderness. The Bill Clinton interregnum makes the comparison inexact but the political left is salivating at the chance to finally have both houses of Congress and the White House in their control. They are confident that they are about to triumph. Look at the triumphalism in leftist blogs.
Personally, I still think the chances are better than even that we will have to endure a President Obama for a term but I’m not ready to count McCain out yet. Obama has to close the deal with the American public and he is a ready source of gaffes. There is a widely held theory that Dewey lost the election because of an outburst where he cursed a railroad engineer for moving the train unexpectedly while Dewey was making a speech from the back platform, a common campaign method of the day.
Truman campaigned by telling the voters that Dewey did not understand the needs of the average American. He called Dewey a candidate of rich people.
One day, Dewey got angry at a railroad engineer because his campaign train was late for a speech. Truman charged that this proved that Dewey did not understand the problems of railroad engineers and other working Americans. He tried to make the election a choice between hard-working Democrats and rich Republicans.
The story isn’t quite correct because what really happened was the train moved unexpectedly, risking injury to the spectators listening to Dewey’s speech. He made a remark about the engineer that he thought would be taken as sympathetic to the crowd. However, it fit another scenario; one of a man who had little sympathy for the common man.
Then on Oct. 12, 1948, Dewey’s train pulled into Beaucoup, Ill. As a crowd of 1,000 people surged toward the rear of the train to greet the governor, the train lurched backward. “That’s the first lunatic I’ve had for an engineer,” Dewey said. “He probably should be shot at sunrise,” the candidate muttered into a microphone, “but we’ll let him off this time since nobody was hurt.” Lee Tindle, the 54-year-old engineer whom Dewey had insulted, was a 30-year veteran of the rails. “I think just as much of Dewey as I did before, and that’s not very much,” Tindle told an Associated Press reporter.
Even without the aid of YouTube or television, word of Dewey’s outburst spread, and Truman took full advantage. He praised his “all Democratic” train crew. Supporters wrote “Lunatics for Truman” on dusty boxcars. While Republicans touted Dewey’s New York administration and his campaign for its efficiency, Truman’s running mate, Alben W. Barkley, chimed in with a timely response: “The governor of New York showed his hand recently by advocating ‘shooting at sunrise’ as a cure for his conception of inefficiency,” Barkley quipped. “We at the Democratic Party do not consider ‘ruthlessness’ a proper synonym for ‘efficiency.’ “
Obama has already set the stage by making comments about small town voters.
He said: “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And it’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
A few more like that and maybe we can start saying President McCain