How to Lose an Election

October 17, 1960

Those who followed the election of 1948 must be struck by the parallel between the campaign conducted by Governor Dewey then and that conducted by Vice President Nixon this year. The present commentator, turning back to his own record of events, finds the parallel even closer than he had remembered.

Let us begin with the overall strategy. Commenting in Newsweek of Nov. 15, 1948, on the reasons for Dewey’s defeat, I wrote: “He assumed that he already had a comfortable . . . lead, that the way to hold it was simply not to make any mistakes, and that the way not to make any mistakes was not to take any stand that would cost him any of his supporters. The result was that he repeated tediously high-sounding truisms about national unity and that he failed to debate the merits of a single major issue. He avoided all the little errors only by making the one tremendous error that defeated him.”

I went on to point out how he had thrown away all his real issues: “He never hinted, except in the vaguest generalities, how he would halt inflation. On New Deal policies such as farm parity payments, social security, public housing, and Federal minimum wages, he adopted a me-too attitude that many of his opponents thought was insincere and that many of his supporters hoped was insincere.”

ROAD TO NOWHERE

Dewey never seemed able to analyze his own mistake. He implied he had lost because the Republican record had been too conservative. I commented on this in Newsweek of Feb. 21, 1949: “What he fails to see is that the most fatal course of all is precisely the sort of ‘middle road’ he recommends one in which the Republicans accept the basic premises of the New Deal but allow themselves to be outbid in their application.”

It is astonishing how even the detailed issues and positions of 1948 parallel those of today. Dewey accepted the New Deal thesis that the country owed the farmers a living. But “his belated and halfhearted acceptance of the ‘parity’ nonsense made them suspect that he and the Republicans would offer them less of the taxpayer’s money than Mr. Truman.” Today Nixon repudiates the Benson farm program for one that he admits would be more expensive at the start but he offers smaller handouts than Kennedy does.

Next (in 1949): “Can the Republicans hope to win if they endorse the principle of Federal minimum-wage laws but offer only 65 cents an hour instead of 75 or only 75 instead of $1?” Or, in today’s terms, only $1.15 instead of $1.25?

Next (in 1949): “Can the Republicans hope to win if they come out belatedly for building private housing at public expense but offer only 500,000 units instead of Mr. Truman’s 1 million? Why so little of a wonderful thing?” The parallel today applies not merely to housing but to Federal aid to local public schools, and a score of other spending projects.

ME TOO, BUT–

Finally I came to social security, which Dewey had accepted in principle though drawing back from too much of it. Here again his attitude versus the Truman proposals of that time has been closely paralleled by Nixon’s attitude toward Kennedy’s old-age medical-care program today.

What is truly amazing is that Nixon, with the record of the Dewey campaign before him, should seem so bent on repeating it. He has yet to point out why any major Kennedy proposal is wrong in principle.

Nixon’s program so far, in brief, seems strangely like Dewey’s in 1948.

“Me too—but not as much.” It is the perfect formula for defeat. It throws away the principle, but reduces the size of the bribe. It loses votes at both ends of the political spectrum. The pressure groups vote against it because the other side offers them more. The conservatives, the taxpayers, those who fear inflation or have faith in the free market, become apathetic or indifferent. It is not true that they have “nowhere else to go.” As the 1948 election proved, they can stay home in droves. If they are to be aroused and got to the polls, the must be convinced that they have a clear-cut alternative worth voting for. There is still time for Nixon to offer it to them.