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If you can't convince 'em, confuse 'em
Dr. Sherman N. Miller
A holistic look at Senator John McCain’s Presidential bid suggests that he hopes to pull off a President Harry S. Truman type win where the media focused on a Thomas Dewey apparent public appeal. The McCain strategists appear to be running a quasi-Truman campaign in reverse. Let us look at the mood that Truman faced to appreciate McCain’s strategic moves. Historynet.com offers in 1948, “. . . The Democrats were further fractured when a coalition of liberals led by Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota inserted a strong civil rights plank, modeled after Truman’s own proposals to Congress, in the platform. Delegates from the conservative South, intent on maintaining segregation there, were adamantly opposed to the plank. Before the nominating process even began, Alabama’s Handy Ellis announced that his state’s presidential electors were ‘never to cast a vote for Harry Truman, and never to cast their vote for any candidate with a civil rights program such as adopted by the convention.’ Half of the Alabama delegation and the entire Mississippi contingent walked out. Two days later, disaffected southern Democrats met in Birmingham, Alabama, to nominate Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina for president. The new party officially called itself the States’ Rights Democrats; the press dubbed them ‘Dixiecrats,’ and the name stuck. The ‘Solid South’–a traditional Democratic stronghold–seemed lost to Truman. . .” McCain’s strategists appear hell-bent on morphing Senator Hillary Clinton’s following into today’s version of the Dixiecrats who oppose the legitimacy of civil rights. The most pungent taint McCain strategists can give civil rights and remain under the radar of the media over claims of blatant racism is subtlety to equate it with Affirmative Action – giving special advantage to minorities in a down economy. Working class whites will feel it is an affront to accept Barack Obama because he represents the thinking that they have shunned. The McCain strategists get to jump for joy because they are morphing Senator Hillary Clinton through advertising, over her non-selection by Barack Obama as his running mate, into today’s version of the late Senator Strom Thurmond.
McCain borrows a quote of President Truman to make it appear that he has
this novel position on the Presidency. On July 22, 2008 Fox News.com
reported John McCain saying,
“. . . . I had the courage
and the judgment to say I would rather lose a political campaign than
lose a war. It seems to me that Obama would rather lose a war in order
to win a political campaign.” On the other hand, President Truman said,
“I would rather have peace in the world than be President.” It is
difficult to believe that the McCain strategists did not lift this
valuation of the office of Presidency from President Truman. Historynet.com also reported, “Truman roused the convention to a standing ovation when he announced his intention to call Congress back into special session to ‘ask them to pass the laws to halt rising prices, to meet the housing crisis–which they say they are for in their platform.’ When this special session did convene it accomplished little, as Truman expected, but it gave the president a campaign issue. The country’s woes, he asserted, were the result of the ‘do-nothing’ Republican Congress.” Are we now hearing the nation’s woes being the results of the Democratic Party do nothing Congress? The imagery is remarkable considering the Democrats went home to their constituencies and President George Bush was seen pointing the finger at them for the nation’s woes. I think if the McCain strategists are exploiting the campaign strategies of the late President Harry S. Truman they need to include one of his famous adages, “The buck stops here!” The economic crisis happened under the stewardship of Republican President George Bush, so the blame lies in the lap of the Republican leadership. The McCain strategists need to stop toying with another adage, “Success has many friends and failure has none.” They are acting like four dollars per gallon of gasoline, home foreclosures, bank failures, shipping jobs overseas, and so on, are inventions of the Democratic Congress considering the Republicans once had control of both The White House and US Congress. McCain strategists are enchanted with fear mongering for they see Obama following one of President Truman’s tenets. “America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.” When we think about the nation teetering on a significant economic collapse, it is disingenuous to contend that the Democrats are responsible for this present economic mess. Imagine oil speculators are now free to exploit financial treason to dictate the global economy to the disadvantage of the working class people in the United States of America. Hence, President Truman offered another adage that needs serious pondering during the course of this 2008 Presidential campaign. “It's plain hokum. If you can't convince 'em, confuse 'em. It's an old political trick. But this time it won't work.”
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/h/harry_s_truman.html
http://www.historynet.com/american-history-harry-truman-and-the-1948-us-presidential-election.htm
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