From the wikipedia article on Thomas Dewey:

Indeed, given Truman’s sinking popularity and the Democratic Party’s three-way split (between Truman, Henry A. Wallace, and Strom Thurmond), Dewey had seemed unstoppable. Republicans figured that all they had to do to win was to avoid making any major mistakes, and as such Dewey did not take any risks. He spoke in platitudes, trying to transcend politics. Speech after speech was filled with empty statements of the obvious, such as the famous quote: “You know that your future is still ahead of you.” An editorial in the Louisville Courier-Journal summed it up:

No presidential candidate in the future will be so inept that four of his major speeches can be boiled down to these historic four sentences: Agriculture is important. Our rivers are full of fish. You cannot have freedom without liberty. Our future lies ahead.^[16]

Part of the reason Dewey ran such a cautious, vague campaign was because of his experiences as a presidential candidate in 1944. In that election Dewey felt that he had allowed Franklin Roosevelt to draw him into a partisan, verbal “mudslinging” match, and he believed that this had cost him votes. As such, Dewey was convinced in 1948 to appear as non-partisan as possible, and to emphasize the positive aspects of his campaign while ignoring his opponent. This strategy proved to be a major mistake, as it allowed Truman to repeatedly criticize and ridicule Dewey, while Dewey never answered any of Truman’s criticisms.^[17

The latest issue of  The Weekly Standard has an article of “There is Hope Yet for McCain” by discussing the Thomas Dewey — Harry Truman race.  The one thing The Weekly Standard article posits on is Dewey’s lack of policy specifics.  This past week Barack Obama’s Energy speech was stepped on and the air leaked out regarding any coverage as McCain threw out the “Celebrity Ad”, the Moses web ad, and played the “Race Card Card”.  I do think that Obama will end up winning the election by, “somewhere between a merely large margin and a landslide”, but McCain is playing the deck he has fairly well, and has successfully done a few things right.  I will note also that the celebrity ad featured words against the Obama Energy speech, but no one noticed.

The “Race Card Card” is instructive.  This election is on some level about race, there’s a black man who might be the first black president, there is not any way of avoiding that.  That fact plays both positively and negatively in electoral terms, and by trying to blunt any reference Obama might give in positive terms about getting America this “historical opportunity, and further bringing it the fore it would stop any criticism by way of the negative — if and when an ad of subtle innuendo, and it will have to be fairly subtle ala the Harold Ford Playboy Mansion ad obstensibly about something else — the marker is there to not criticize the ad.  So, the positive effects are blunted and the negative is heightened.

I might also point out that if you consider Dewey as having played the “Prevent Defense”, the comparison is that everyone remembers when that didn’t work in a game and forgets the many boring times the Prevent Defense did effectively kill the clock in a game.  So Dewey losing to Truman was the equivalent of that famed playoff game where the Buffalo Bills came back to beat the Houston Texans Oilers.(1)  Meanwhile, Clinton defeated Dole and Nixon defeated Humphrey and Dole and Humphrey in the waning days of the election claimed to be the next Truman.

(1) Correction made as per comment.  What’s weird is that as I typed that, I had the thought in mind that I could very easily make that error, and yet… I did.  As per the chronology, I am thinking a little nonlinear here, so I shrug that one off, even though all concerns would be wiped out with a change of the word “was” to “is” thus better suggesting a vantage point not from 1948 but from the here and now of 2008.

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