The Ghosts of 1948

Everyone's seen the picture. It's in every school social studies book. It's President Harry S Truman triumphantly holding up the most famously wrong newspaper headline in American political history--the Chicago Daily Tribune's declaration "Dewey Defeats Truman."

The election of 1948 has become part of the mythology of the modern presidency, and the ghosts of '48 seem to alternately encourage or taunt a presidential candidate hoping for a come-from-behind win on election day. John McCain clearly hopes to follow in Truman's footsteps. How realistic are his hopes? Robert Schlesinger, who writes for U.S. News and World Report, has an outstanding piece up at Jefferson Street, the U.S. News blog, entitled Past & Present: Harry Truman's 1948 Comeback Campaign. (Robert is a Middlebury classmate to many of us here at RickeyPAC, is very astute, and has appeared on The Daily Show. You should read his article. You should also buy his book White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters.)

Rob's articles recounts the details of the '48 campaign, so I will only repeat the broad strokes here. It is necessary, though, to put Truman's campaign in context in order to understand how it may--or may not--apply to 2008.

It is not exaggeration to say that Truman was besieged on all sides as the election of 1948 approached. The midterm elections of 1946 had been disastrous for the Democrats, with Republicans winning control of the House and Senate. Truman, or at least his policies, were proving highly unpopular according to polls. Finally, for all the talk of a split Democratic party after this year's primaries, Truman had to hold together a highly unstable coalition in his own party: African Americans and liberal northerners pushing for civil rights; Southern conservatives adamantly opposed to them; FDR's labor allies; and Jewish voters who wanted American support for an indepent Jewish state in Palestine.

Truman responded with a train tour of what some people would term "flyover country" today, the myriad small towns of the Midwest and West, which bolstered Truman's popularity with voters and garnered him favorable press. Truman, it seems, made for very good copy. In an epic campaign swing that was a grueling experience for Truman and his staff, the president gave four major addresses and dozens of minor ones, all of them delivered off the cuff from an outline put together by Clark Clifford and a team of speechwriters traveling with the president. Truman was famously terrible at delivering a speech from a prepared text. From there, momentum built until Truman won a decisive victory on election night. Despite a split in the Democratic Party over civil rights--Strom Thurmond and his "Dixiecrat" faction ran as a third party--the final tally wasn't even close. Here is what the electoral map looked like once all the votes were counted in 1948 (note that Alaska, Hawaii and Washington DC did not have electoral votes then):



So can McCain replicate Truman's success? Here are what I believe are the factors in Truman's victory, in no particular order of importance, and how they might apply to the Republican campaigning:

Gaffes by your opponent: Truman got lucky in this regard. First, there was the train tour. It's now known as "The Whistlestop Tour" and in 2008 the term "whistlestop" evokes a romantic image of scenic small towns full of decent, hard-working people. Just the sort of people John McCain and Sarah Palin have been trying to reach this year. But in 1948, "whistlestop" was a term of derision, and it was coined by Republican Senate Majority Leader Robert Taft. A whistlestop was a town too small to even merit a train station, so a train stopped and whistled for passengers or mail. If there were none, they moved on. Basically, in 1948, the Republicans (or at least one of their leaders) were dissing small-town America. McCain's been trying to make hay at times over Barack Obama's infamous "bitter" comments from this spring but that hasn't seemed to work, probably because Hillary Clinton already got plenty of mileage out of them in the primaries. In 2008, the Democrats just haven't been giving McCain many gaffes that he can exploit.

The fine art of negative campaigning: One of Truman's great strengths as a president and campaigner was he knew when he needed to be pragmatic, and when he knew when he needed to be partisan. Under the broadest sense of the term, Truman went negative but his target wasn't Republican nominee Thomas E. Dewey. Indeed, Truman rarely referred to Dewey, and when he did it was almost never by name (it was almost always "my Republican opponent"). Truman instead ran against the 80th Congress, calling it the "Do-Nothing Congress," a name that still sticks. McCain has tried to do something similar in the latter stages of the campaign this year, raising the specter of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sharing in the leadership of an Obama presidency but again, it doesn't seem to have had much effect. Part of it is that Reid and Pelosi are neither as well-known or as formidable as Robert Taft was in 1948. Taft was arguably more powerful a figure than Reid in the Senate, and had been a serious candidate for the Republican nomination in 1948. The GOP decided to go with the more liberal Dewey instead. McCain's other problem with tarring the current Congress with the "do-nothing" label is that it's been the Republican minority stonewalling legislation.

A unified team: This has been a serious and growing problem for the McCain team in the last few days, with the Republican ticket seeming to split between the presidential and vice presidential nominees. It's hard to imagine such a thing even being possible with Truman's team. The campaign staff, led by the gifted Clark Clifford, were people who trusted the president and who were trusted by Truman in return. This dynamic just doesn't seem to exist in the McCain campaign. Clark Clifford was working so hard during the '48 campaign he suffered an attack of stress-induced boils. It's hard to imagine the same thing happening to Steve Schmidt or Doug Davis.

Poor campaigning by the opponent: This, in my opinion, is the largest point of departure between 1948 and 2008. By all accounts, Thomas Dewey ran a poor campaign. Seen as cool and aloof, he was complacent; he believed the hype that everyone else but Truman and his inner circle had bought: that in January 1949, Thomas E. Dewey would be sworn in to office. He coasted. Barack Obama is doing anything but. In comments after her interview with Barack Obama, Rachel Maddow commented about how Obama and his senior staff were confident but not complacent. They were pushing their ground forces hard and are ready for anything. Exactly the opposite of the Republicans in 1948. McCain's just out of luck here, and even his supporters admit as much.

There is more. Much, much more. Too much for a humble blog to do justice to. But I think these are the biggest factors. Taking into account that anything can happen in politics, the stars just don't seem to be aligning for McCain in the same way the did for Harry Truman 60 years ago. If McCain does pull off the very improbable, he will have to create a whole new dynamic.

The biggest lesson to us is: every vote counts. Whether you cast a vote for McCain or Obama in the privacy of the voting booth what the ghosts of 1948 do have to tell us is that every vote counts, and no one has anything in the bag until after those votes are counted!