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Jewish World Review July 3, 2000 / 30 Sivan, 5760
Chris Matthews
He's already saying that. The question is how much
further he will go to win the office on which he long ago
set his heart.
The polls are ominous. CNN reports him trailing
Republican George W. Bush 39 to 52 percent. An
absolute majority of likely voters now prefer the sunny
Texas governor. A quarter of Gore's own party says it
would prefer some other Democratic candidate this
November.
Gore's latest hazard is that voters don't buy his denials of
collaboration in the Dick Morris-Bill Clinton scam to pay
for the 1996 re-election. They think he went to that
Buddhist temple to get what he got: the money. They
don't buy the "iced tea" defense that he was in the john
when chief of staff Leon Panetta watched him being
briefed on the White House "coffees" and
dialing-for-dollars operation.
Gore's hope is that he can do what another Democrat did
when suffering from a whiff of corruption.
In 1948, UC-Berkeley invited President Harry Truman to
give its commencement address. Suffering from a 36-percent job approval
rating and strapped party finances, Truman jumped at the excuse to travel
cross-country at taxpayer expense.
That June, the man who rose to the presidency through the kindness of
Democratic bosses and the death of Franklin Roosevelt, made history.
"I am going down to Berkeley to get me a degree," he joked to the thousand
Ohio loyalists who greeted him at his first, 5:45 a.m. train stop. The trip, he
assured them, was purely "non-partisan," in fact "bipartisan." It was nothing of
the kind. Expected by everyone to lose the election in November, the simple
man from Missouri was using the two weapons of his limited arsenal: the perks
of the office and a shameless readiness to "Give 'em hell" — to say anything
bad about the rival Republicans that a wavering voter might believe.
The welcome Truman received was impossible to imagine by today's
standards. Forty-five thousand people came out for him at Berkeley. A million
lined the streets of Los Angeles. Harder to measure was the impact in all those
heartland "whistle stops" when the president of the United States himself came
to visit.
Add to this the power of Truman's rhetoric in that unforgettable '48 campaign.
"The Republican gluttons of privilege are cold men. They are cunning men," he
warned. "And it is their constant aim to put the government of the United States
under the control of men like themselves. They want a return of the Wall Street
economic dictatorship."
"Dictatorship!"
"Before Hitler came to power," Truman told voters, "control over the German
economy had passed into the hands of a small group of rich manufacturers,
bankers and landowners. These men decided that Germany had to have a
tough, ruthless dictator who would play their game and crush the strong
German labor unions. So they put their money and influence behind Adolf
Hitler. We know the rest of the story.
"Dewey's election threatens the same in America!
"The lobbies which work for big business found that they could get what their
bosses wanted from the Republican leaders. Is that the kind of future you
want?"
Historian Zachary Karabell, in his new book, The Last Campaign,"," writes:
"For all the complaints about negative campaigning in the television age, no
subsequent major candidate compares with Truman for sheer demagogy and
character assassination."
"Decrying that one party is out of sync with the country is not the same as
saying that one party has betrayed, robbed and defrauded the American
people," Karabell adds.
On election day, California joined the Midwest and the then-Democratic South
to offset defeat in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, to give Truman
his victory.
This fall, another Democrat faces the danger of humiliating defeat. As in '48,
many Democrats are saying they wish they had a better candidate.
Is Al Gore ready to wield the same doomsday rhetoric to avoid the harrowing
unknown of defeat? Is he ready to scare voters with the same caliber of terror
Truman used to dismember Dewey?
Knowing Gore, the question answers
06/29/00: No echoes in this presidential choice
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