ROMNEY’S ‘DEWEY’ DESTINY
His odds look slim, but could we be wrong?
WASHINGTON— Of all the sights and sounds of Washington, my favourite is the legendary news disaster hanging on the wall of the National Press Club, five floors above the Toronto Star’s office here.
It’s yellowed with age, badly framed, tucked away all but unnoticed in a corner of the club’s topfloor Reliable Sources bar and grill.
But it’s still a jaw-dropper — a rare original copy of the spectacularly wrong banner headline that rolled off the Chicago Tribune’s presses on Nov. 3, 1948. “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN” — yes, all in caps — is arguably the most embedded mistake in American culture. The rock band Rush once put it on an album cover. The Simpsons, Family Guy and The Onion have all made satirical hay of it.
And just this summer, CNN had the headline hung around its neck in a digital meme mocking the network for hastily miscalling the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that upheld Barack Obama’s health-care overhaul.
It’s still something to see the real thing up close. Everyone in this era of pre-emptive journalism who wants to call elections before they happen should take the time.
Mitt Romney, especially, might want to ponder it as he readies for the debates of October, starting Wednesday night in Denver. Three debates, head to head with Obama, the only tic-tac-toe plays left for the Republican campaign-from-hell.
Romney’s already been compared to Dewey, the almost-winner of 1948. Both came from Michigan, both served as governors in the northeast, both bore the Republican banner with caution as their watchword, believing victory was simply a matter of avoiding mistakes and letting the public’s disappointment in the other guy take hold. Thomas Dewey was so milquetoast on the stump that a Louisville, Ky., newspaper editor was moved to predict that, “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.” Sounds like Mitt Dewey, doesn’t it? But apart from telling you who is going to win on Nov. 6, what, really, do we know? One month ago I was among those stuffed inside the Tampa Bay Times Forum for Clint Eastwood’s “empty chair” moment. Yes, Hollywood’s most famous Republican came across as a doddery, rambling old man.
But inside the arena, surrounded by hardcore GOP loyalists loudly loving every minute of it, Eastwood’s rant came across as something less than disaster. It wasn’t until hours later, once the web took ownership in brilliantly mocking overdrive, that “empty chair” built to a convention-killing crescendo, entirely drowning out Romney’s bid to rebrand himself.
Most reporters flew to Tampa — and flew again to the Democrat bunfest in Charlotte a week later. I drove down and back, speaking to Americans along the way.
And what I found was similar to the vibe earlier this year, during a 4,000-kilometre trek along the con- troversial Keystone XL pipeline route: a sense of profound disgust with politics as a whole. Beth Vittatoe, 35, a working mother of six, described her contempt as “a decision between the least of two evils.” She’s been laid off twice in the last four years in Charlotte, N.C. But for the moment at least she’s back at her white-collar job as a construction scheduler for electrical power plants. Vittatoe saw a Washington so in thrall to corporate influence that “nothing is going to change however we vote. It isn’t going to stop until we find a way to separate the lawmakers from the money-makers.” Perhaps her point is moot. Probably, the polls are right. The cacoph- ony of conservative complaint this week was that familiar refrain, the of course the polls tilt for Obama, because the liberal media has its hand on the scale. And then, on Thursday, Fox News, the elephant-trumpet of all things Republican, came out with the same numbers. Myself, I’ve come to trust Washington’s Pew Research Center more than most, not least because they tend to poll 2,000 people at a time — twice as many as most of their peers. Unlike some, they are very good at reaching that growing swath of voters who only have cellphones. On Thursday, Pew’s top number crunchers, Andrew Kohut and Michael Dimock, walked a small group of us through their latest data — numbers that really would make Team Romney cringe. Obama is up eight points nationally, 51to 43. And his support is far more positive — 74 per cent of Obama supporters are actually for Obama, whereas 52 per cent of Romney’s fall in the hold-their-nose camp, primarily motivated by the desire to unseat Obama. Make of that what you will.
Moreover, Romney has all but lost his only edge. Last spring, Americans saw him as better positioned than Obama to navigate the economy and create jobs. Now the candidates break even on that question, with Obama leading on every other, from foreign policy to empathy for everyday Americans.
The Pew’s Kohut wouldn’t directly answer the question, “Is this Obama’s election to lose?” The numbers, he said, speak for themselves.
But he did offer a few timely reminders of what has come before. At precisely this moment in 1980, Jimmy Carter looked to be on reasonably stable ground against Ronald Reagan — until that first debate, when Reagan famously turned around public perceptions, changing American minds.
Al Gore, we were reminded, was five points ahead of George W. Bush in 2000 going into the first debate, where he spent far too much time sighing in frustration, much to the delight of Saturday Night Live.
As for long shots, nothing approaches the gap-closure of Gerald Ford, the president-by-default after Richard Nixon’s Watergate-era impeachment. At one point, Ford trailed Carter by 40 percentage points in 1976. He lost by only one.
None of this is to diminish the improbable, perhaps impossible, task facing Team Romney. For all the advertising dollars about to descend on the home stretch, Pew’s YouTube numbers are startling. Democratic convention speeches by Obama and Bill Clinton have been viewed nearly nine times more than Romney’s. And Romney’s “47 per cent video” has been viewed two million more times than his convention speech.
What the Pew people conclude is that this time around, it’s personal. Romney has to do nothing less than pull a Ronald Reagan. Unbrand himself from a year of definitions, self-inflicted and otherwise.
“If Romney’s going to win, he has to improve his personal image,” said Kohut. The debates are where that has to happen.
I would humbly submit that the media hate nothing more than a static storyline. And as much as Romney seems destined to follow in Dewey’s footsteps, a slightest whiff of comeback may become just as inflated as his many missteps.
Meanwhile, Americans are decidedly not fired up, not ready to go. But they’re still the ones who will decide when this thing is over.