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Looking Backward

By on March 31, 2012

As we approach the 100th post by the Press, I thought it would be interesting to go back now and look again at Number 1. It was written at the start of last December before the primaries began, but oddly at a time when Romney was still widely regarded as the inevitable 2012 candidate for the Republican Party.

Rereading the piece reminds me there is good cause to compare him to Thomas E Dewey, though I think I overestimated how many people still knew Dewey’s name.  Like the former New York governor, he is removed and distant on the stump and an unconvincing  campaigner. Like Dewey, he seems to stake his arguments on his opponent’s alleged failures. The public perception of Romney has actually declined in the four months since I wrote this piece. Many blame his fitful struggles to nail down the nomination at any cost to himself and his backers.

There are significant differences. Dewey was elected governor three times. Dewey had an enviable record as a crime buster and crusading District Attorney that he never tried to deny. Romney keeps trying to convince Republicans that his health care reforms as a one-term Governor of Massachusetts were nothing like those of Barak Obama. I’m not sure many are buying it.

Dewey may have been dull on the stump but I never read that he was clueless. That’s another place where Romney departs from his 1944 and 1948 predecessor. Time after time Mitt seems like the Bertie Wooster of American politics, clueless, dim and self-satisfied. We hear about his wife’s Cadillacs, his car elevator, his many homes, his millionaire friends, his desire to serenade his supporters. McCain could not disguise his lack of respect for him in 2008. Santorum and Gingrich have let their disdain for the man show in 2012. Romney needs a Jeeves to keep him focused and he hasn’t found one. George W Bush at least had Karl Rove. Dewey was respected even in defeat. Nixon later asked him to be Chief Justice.

The Republicans are trying to close ranks around Romney now that Santorum has exposed himself as too extreme on social issues and another sufferer of foot-in-mouth disease. Listening to their endorsements however, an observer could be excused from thinking the Party still doesn’t want him. The South definitely does not want him. Will they show up in November?

The right-wing of the Republican Party is against him because he doesn’t pass the Conservative litmus test. The moderate and liberal wings of the party have been jettisoned and have nothing to say. Independents will likely see him as a clueless aristocrat who dreams of looking in the mirror and seeing the President of the United States looking back. This is not a platform to win elections.

We hear about his record as a corporate turn-around expert, a sound businessman, but as the campaign wears on, he  seems mostly like a corporate raider, dismantling troubled companies and pocketing some of their cash for himself. Sometimes CEO-types like Romney get the credit for things others around them do. I do not sense another Lee Iacocca at work here. He has not convinced me he alone could turn around a failing lemonade stand. 

Romney is reminiscent of Dewey. And also of P G Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster, a benign bumbler who blithely soaks up the good life others provided for him. It still seems like Obama’s race to lose. The best thing going for Romney now is that Obama does not remind voters of Harry Truman. The question will be who reminds voters in November of the next president.

Tom Godfrey

The Return of Thomas E Dewey

Posted on December 9, 2011 by 

This season’s Republican battle for the presidential nomination has been like watching the numbers in an elevator bank in the Empire State Building. They seem to go up and down momentarily. In the long run this morning’s poll numbers mean nothing. What’s up today may be out of service tomorrow, like Herman Cain or Donald Trump or Sara Palin.

The long term message is that the remaining rump of the once venerable GOP can’t seem to find a candidate they like. True, some of the field wouldn’t have got through the door in past races. Does one imagine Bachmann, Santorum or Perry in a serious battle against Goldwater, Nelson Rockefeller, Nixon or Reagan?

The one person who remains fairly constant through all this is Willard ‘Mitt’ Romney. A savior of the Olympics, master of the leveraged buy-out and rapid take over, one time governor of Massachusetts, he has the credentials to stand on the stage and debate. But as the fortunes of his opponents rise and fall, he stays steadily at 20-25% in the polls. Over time this tells us that about 75% of the Republicans polled don’t want him. In a general election this means disaster. There are more registered Democrats and far more Independents.

His proponents claim he is steady and constant, a family man, and he looks like a traditional president, something incidentally once said of Warren G. Harding.  Even his detractors comment that his debate performance has improved, he seems calm and focused in the room. Most still feel he will be the nominee.

In truth he reminds this writer of Thomas E Dewey, the one-time governor of New York, a respected prosecutor and reformer. He is earnest. He is well groomed. He is willing to stoop to glad-handing and back slapping. Dewey was a shoo in to beat Truman in 1948, except that in the end, voters did not want him and said so Election Day.

Alice Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter once said Dewey reminded her of the groom on a wedding cake. It was not a compliment. Reporters covering the campaign noticed that Dewey got more yawns than spirited applause. Truman had fumbled and stumbled during his first term, handing Republicans the mid-term election in 1946. The new Congress then attacked labor and tried to thwart Truman’s programs including health care reform, while raising the specter of a red scare threatening the nation. He was an easy target.

As just about everyone knows, Truman went on to win the election, saw his popularity evaporate and then retired four years later, declining to run for another term to which he was entitled. Certainly Truman would not have beat war hero Eisenhower, but would he have beat Senator Robert Taft?

It is hard not to see parallels between Romney and Dewey. Mitt may be slicker in a debate, but he still looks stiff and ill at ease in public, often overly eager to please. And then there are the occasional gaffes like complaining to Fox News staff backstage that he didn’t like the questions or the way he was being handled. There is a petulant component to the man even the high-minded Dewey avoided.

If the money boys in the Republican party want to defeat a vulnerable president at the polls in November of next year, they better get busy and come up with a better candidate pretty soon. The well-fed Gingrich’s behavior sometimes borders on sociopathy, never a winning element in a long race. And he is about as fresh as the perennial, never blooming Harold Stassen was so many years ago. The rest of the field are non-starters.

Rump party it may be, encumbered by the emotionality of the religious right, weighted down by what seems to be some left-over Wallace-ites, morally compromised by fanny-kissing stooges for wealthy contributors and special interest groups, but if the Republicans want a future into this century, they better find another Ronald Reagan or better Abe Lincoln pretty soon.

Right now the election is still Obama’s to lose. And that in itself says a lot about the state of the Republican Party.

Tom Godfrey

 

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