William Stuntz, a professor at Harvard Law School, makes a telling comparison between this presidential campaign and the 1948 race between Harry Truman and Tom Dewey. "Like Bush, Truman was widely ridiculed - a common saying at the time held that 'to err is Truman' - and widely believed to be too stupid to be an effective president," he writes on techcentral.com. ""Like John Kerry, Dewey was a smart man but a dull campaigner. And not so likeable as his opponent."
Tom Dewey was stiff and boring. Harry was earthy. Dewey exuded unctuous confidence with repetitive glibness. Harry fought as "one of the boys." Dewey's party stood behind their man, but without passion or enthusiasm. Harry showed a natural masculinity in his soft wool fedora. Dewey, said Alice Roosevelt Longworth in one of the most famous of all put-downs, "looks like the little man on the wedding cake."
The Truman-Dewey comparison has its limits, but George W., like Harry Truman, acts as if he understands "the buck stops here." That understanding has shaped his foreign policy and, like Harry Truman, he stands stubbornly by his decisions as the nation faces a new and deadly menace.
Truman confronted the Communists armed with nuclear weapons; we all lived in fear. George W. confronts terrorists who are using everything they've got to terrify us, taking war to them to keep them out of our homeland. Truman sought to contain menace by limiting its expansion. The Korean War, like the war in Iraq, wasn't popular, but like the war in Iraq was deemed necessary.
Harry Truman clinched his election at the end of a whistle-stop tour of America, the last of the railroad campaigns, with a powerful speech in St. Louis. He spoke of the press being unrelentingly against him (sound familiar?), and told the voters that he counted on them to think and speak for themselves.
"Do your duty as citizens of the greatest republic the sun has even shone on." He knew how to cut to the chase. We should "give 'em hell" again, this time for Harry.