Will Republicans Make Fatal Mistake of Nominating Another Thomas Dewey to Face Harry Truman Wannabe President Obama?



Gov. Thomas Dewey

I said several months ago, before the Republican primary season, that President Barack Obama would run a Harry Truman-style re-election campaign in which he rallied for the common man and against the big business and the do-nothing Congress.  I just didn't know at the time the Republicans would play along with the Obama strategy by nominating the second coming of Truman's 1948 opponent, Thomas Dewey.  Yesterday former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney won a solid victory in New Hampshire's primary with 40% of the vote. His next closest challenger was Ron Paul with 23% of the vote.

Like Romney, Dewey was a governor of a northeastern state, serving as governor of New York from 1943 to 1954.  Romney was also governor of a northeastern state Massachusetts.  Dewey was an advocate for big business interests and favored an unfettered interventionist foreign policy.  Dewey was part of the more liberal establishment wing of the Republican Party.  Romney is too.  Dewey had a privileged childhood; Romney's was even more privileged. He was born a multi-millionaire.

The driving force right now in politics is economic populism.  While they have different goals, both the tea party and occupy movements are essentially populists movements that rail against the use of government to aid big business.  If the Republicans proceed to nominate Mitt Romney, which is growing more likely, the tea party populist energy of the party goes out the door as well as the newly energized, Ron Paul-led libertarian wing of the GOP.

A Romney nomination gives Obama the opportunity to run a non-holds barred populist campaign, reminiscent of the then unpopular Truman's 1948 whistle-stop campaign against Dewey.  Romney's time at Bain Capital, in which he worked to reorganize companies by laying off working men and women, might be intellectually defensible from a macro-economic standpoint.  But in the world of politics, it is easily exploitable.

The polls showing Romney the "most electable" against Obama are a mirage.  Nominating Romney, a card carrying member of the so-called 1% in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, is like feeding fresh meat to a lion.  Truman, er President Obama, will rip Romney to shreds.

If the GOP does nominate Romney, there will be one stark difference between the the 1948 and 2012 presidential elections.  The result.  The Truman-Dewey contest was close.  An Obama-Romney race will be a landslide for the President.

See Advance Indiana's excellent take on this issue posted today:  "Will The American People Elect Gordon Gekko President?"