A 1948 Kentucky newspaper editorial remarked that Tom Dewey's second try for the White House -- his confident but plodding, uninspiring campaign -- could be "boiled down to these historic four sentences: Agriculture is important. Our rivers are full of fish. You cannot have freedom without liberty. The future lies ahead."
Although Mr. Dewey's banalities failed him personally once again, in what was probably the most dramatic upset in American political history, for the next 60 years his party largely stayed the course, cluttering the electoral mind with patriotic clichés and hackneyed nothings designed to numb rather than enlighten -- from "Who lost China?" to "Morning in America" to "Never Surrender." The GOP kept the message -- the basics -- but went on to add considerable verve to its delivery, and to much greater effect.
Theirs has been quite a ride they've taken us on -- burying the devilish details of an empire's cost in all the uplifting, inspirational rhetoric of nationalistic pride. But while the GOP has been almost miraculously successful by virtue of sticking with inspirational generalities, they have now met their match. In Barack Obama. And the GOP doesn't like it. It doesn't like it one bit.
To give you some idea of just how unhappy, frustrated and utterly disoriented in unfamiliar territory the party is, John McCain chose his victory rally last Tuesday night to deliver, Dewey-style, these plodding words: "Hope, my friends, is a powerful thing." But "to encourage a country with only rhetoric, rather than sound and proven ideas that trust in the strength and courage of free people, is not a promise of hope. It is a platitude."
Reword those lines in the vernacular and here's what you get: Obama has stolen the GOP's thunder. He's on to its game. He's using its tactics. And boy, is it pissed. So pissed, it's reduced to characterizing his soaring rhetoric -- its own, traditionally soaring rhetoric -- as platitudinous.
To make matters even worse for the GOP, it's stuck with a delivery boy as plodding and uninspiring as Tom Dewey. This likely accounts for a good deal of conservatives' unhappiness with their candidate. They didn't so much care about his past apostasies as they merely hankered after another actor who could puff the party line with some real pizazz.
Sorry, fellas. You're saddled with John, whose flat-lining monologues are sure to lull millions into a sound, eight-month slumber.
Obama has also anticipated the GOP's desperate maneuvering. On the same day -- yesterday -- that McCain was charging Obama with being "singularly lacking in specifics," the Illinois senator was on the stump, talking of "creating a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank to invest $60 billion over 10 years and create nearly 2 million new jobs in the construction field," and "renew[ing] his call to create an energy plan to invest $150 billion over 10 years to establish a 'green energy sector' to add up to 5 million jobs in the next two decades."
He would pay for these necessities, he said, by dumping the unnecessary albatross of John's favorite war from our fiscal shoulders.
McCain flanked. Obama pivoted. And all without sacrificing those "powerful things" of rhetorical "hope" and "promise." It was a thing of beauty.
And what "specifics" is John left to tout? Well, let's see. There's his unpopular war. That should be a national crowd pleaser. There's his determination to do virtually nothing about this nation's unconscionable lack of health care. There went 47 million votes. And of course he can always get specific about why it was he rightfully opposed all those tax cuts for plutocrats way back when, but now sees them as something more than the costly stuff that dreams are made of.
So McCain is left in an almost entirely defensive position. And, as Karl Rove taught him back in 2000, "Explaining is losing."
The Republican candidate has only one offensive thrust to play -- that old, tired, worn-out GOP saw: Its opponent is a liberal.
"It’s not an accident that he has, I think, according to the National Journal, the most liberal voting record in the United States Senate. I have one of the most conservative," said McCain. That worked when the vast center was tilting center-right. But the vast center has had enough of that. It has seen what it gets them.
Smartly, Obama is now -- finally, liberally and with emphasis -- connecting the foreign dots to the domestic: "Politicians like John McCain and Hillary Clinton voted for a war in Iraq that should’ve never been authorized and never been waged -- a war that is costing us thousands of precious lives and billions of dollars a week. It’s time to stop spending billions of dollars a week trying to put Iraq back together and start spending the money on putting America back together instead."
That's the one decisive argument to be made in this campaign -- the one that only Obama can make. It cripples McCain and leaves him with no rational comeback. He'll be stuttering defensively from now till November.
On the other hand, McCain could always just concentrate on reminding us that agriculture is important. Our rivers are full of fish. You cannot have freedom without liberty. And the future lies ahead. That should give him roughly the same 3-to-2 electoral-count loss that it gave Tom Dewey.