Elections

Winning by losing

by Seth Gitell

DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN!

The Chicago Tribune's mistaken early headline has been a joke in journalistic and political circles for years. Everyone knows that Thomas Dewey lost to Harry Truman. Or did he?

In the new book The Last Campaign: How Harry Truman Won the 1948 Election (Knopf), historian Zachary Karabell suggests that Dewey really won that campaign -- not in terms of numbers, but in terms of lasting legacy. Subsequent presidential candidates have closely followed the road map that Dewey laid out as a packaged, charismatic, always-smiling candidate. One reason for this change, he says, was television: American TV, in particular, lends itself best to easily digestible sound bites.

Just look at the 2000 presidential election: both Al Gore and George W. Bush are Deweys, says Karabell, sipping coffee in Harvard Square. The 32-year-old scholar, who was educated at Columbia and Oxford and took his PhD at Harvard, is part of a breed of historians -- like Douglas Brinkley and Michael Beschloss -- who focus on narrative history. At a time when micro-analysis dominates academic history departments, they tell ripping yarns that illuminate larger historical points.

If Gore and Bush are both playing the Dewey role, who was Truman in this year's race? Senator John McCain, who is now touring Vietnam rather than preparing for a November election. That says a lot, Karabell says: "The whole McCain phenomenon was fascinating in showing how the populist candidate will not win."

Karabell also says the 1948 election was the last time the American public had real ideological choices in a presidential race. In addition to Dewey, the Republican, and Truman, the Democrat, voters also had the option of voting for Henry Wallace of the left-leaning Progressive Party and Strom Thurmond of the pro-Jim Crow States' Right Party -- yes, the same Strom Thurmond! Of today's choice between two establishment candidates, Karabell says: "Two points of view is not ideological diversity."

What about Patrick Buchanan, whose mix of isolationism, nativism, and protectionism makes him the candidate most like the Thurmond of 1948? "The degree that he is completely marginalized shows the degree to which the views on the spectrum of choices don't get that much attention," Karabell says, adding that he can envision TV reporters deciding to cover Buchanan in desperation because the Bush-Gore contest is so boring.

Still, Karabell remains something of an optimist. "Maybe this is the nadir and it can only go uphill from here," he says.