The Return of Thomas E Dewey

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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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