Reply #5: The Road Map to the White House

[Daveparts]

As we approach the not soon enough Presidential campaign, the fever of discontent is rabid among the voters A Newsweek poll asked are you satisfied with the way the country’s going? 65% answered, no 29% answered yes they were satisfied. The fortunes for the Republicans look rough, but the public doesn’t view the Democrats in a much better light. If they expect to capitalize and build on their recent success they must produce results and quickly! The people view both parties as self interested and disconnected from the people.

A man from Missouri ran for President in 1948 a poll of fifty newspaper editors nationwide came back fifty to zero against his election. Factions in his own party asked him for the good of the party to step down, the party eventually split three ways making the chances of election even more remote. Everyone was certain he didn’t stand a chance except one, himself. “Except for the reward of service” he told the Secretary of State “I find little satisfaction in being President.” He further told his sister “No man in his right mind would ever wish to be President if they knew what it entailed.”

So except for the reward of service why would he fight for a job he didn’t like? Perhaps he had a chip on his shoulder, a farmer without a college education he was a failed small businessman, Entering the army as a corporal he left a captain, with one superior officer reading his performance reports commented “get him in here, hell, no ones that good” but according to the men that served under him he was that good. So why did he do it? In his own words, He felt it was his duty to “Get into the fight and help stem the tide of reaction. They (the Republicans) did not understand the worker, the farmer, the everyday person… Most of them honestly believed that prosperity actually began at the top and would trickle down in due time to benefit all the people.”

He began his campaign speech by stating clearly what he thought the country needed, he told the speechwriters what to write and if he didn’t like it he told them to change it for he was his own campaign adviser, he didn’t have a spin room or a focus group. The liberals in the party had abandoned him the conservatives had formed their own party. He called for National Health Insurance; he wanted to raise the minimum wage not by a nickel or a dime but by more than 55% he called for a poor mans tax cut. “Our first goal” he said “Is to secure fully the essential human rights of our citizens.” This was 1948 his position was not considered astute it had already caused a split in his party yet he continued.

“Not all groups are free to live and work where they please or to improve their conditions of life by their own efforts. Not all groups enjoy the full privileges of citizenship…
The federal government has a clear duty to see that the Constitutional guarantees of individual liberties and equal protection under the laws are not denied or abridged anywhere in the union.” He called for federal laws against “The crime of lynching, against which I cannot speak too strongly.” He called for an end to poll taxes and end to discrimination by employers and labor unions. He called for Congress to act on the claims of Japanese Americans forced from their homes and kept in confinement “Solely because of their racial origin”

Several Southern Democrats meeting privately with him, explained all would be forgiven if he would only soften his views. He responded “But my very stomach turned over when I learned that Negro soldiers just back from overseas, were being dumped out of army trucks in Mississippi and beaten. Whatever my inclinations as a native of Missouri might have been, as President I know this is bad. I shall fight to end evils like this.”

With his approval rating at 36% in June he took to the rails as the press had already written him off. He told the crowds “I am coming out here so you can have a look at me and hear what I have to say, and then you make up your own mind as to whether you believe some of the things that have been said about your President. Yet every where he went the people turned out 1,000 at tiny Crestline, 100,000 in Chicago in Republican Omaha 160,000 lined the streets. In Missoula they waited late into the night, He appeared in his bathrobe and pajamas, “I’m sorry I had gone to bed, but I thought you would like to see what I looked like even if I didn’t have on any clothes”

His attacks were pointed and not just at Congress “Educate yourself, you don’t want to do like you did in 46 when two thirds of you stayed home and look what a Congress we got! That’s your fault, that is your fault, you know, this Congress is interested in the welfare of the better classes. They are not interested in the welfare of the common everyday man.” A cry from the crowd said pour it on! He answered, “I’m going to, I’m going to.”
At Seattle 100,000 in Los Angeles an estimated one million lined the route from the train station to his hotel.

“The only prize we covet is the respect and good will of our fellow members of the family of nations. The only realm in which we aspire to eminence exists in the minds of men, where authority is exercised through the qualities of sincerity, compassion and right conduct…

After the convention it was back on the road “It’s going to be tough on everybody but that’s the way it’s got to be. I know I can take it. I’m only afraid that I’ll kill some of my staff and I like you all very much and I don’t want to do that. In September the polls had him behind 48% to 38% yet he kept drawing huge crowds.

“I wonder how many times you have to be hit on the head before you find out who’s hitting you? These Republican gluttons of privilege are cold men. They are cunning men… They want the return of the Wall Street economic dictatorship.”

“ I’m not asking you to vote for me, vote for yourself,”

“Something happens to Republicans when they get control of the government… Republicans in Washington have a habit of becoming curiously deaf to the voice of the people. They have a hard time hearing what the ordinary people of the country are saying. But they have no trouble at all hearing what Wall Street is saying. They are able to catch the slightest whisper from big business and special interest.”

“You don’t get any double talk from me, I’m either for something or against it, and you know it.

Give ‘em Hell, Harry! “I just tell the truth and they think its hell!”

It all seems so simple now, with our strategy teams and polling groups our Carl Roves and James Stephanoplis and all the other guru’s. That this one man could take his case to the American people and win by over two million votes and had his party not been split he would have carried New York and it would had been a landslide. Just from these few quotes you know much about this man, about what he thought because he didn’t think of himself as a philosopher or even the smartest man in the room. To him it was simple,
right is right and wrong is wrong. Gifted is making the difficult look easy, genius is making the impossible look easy. Speak the truth, listen to the people, and support the right thing even if it’s currently unpopular if it’s right. Put the good of the country and the people of the country as your only goal.

“It’s amazing all that can be accomplished if you don’t care who gets the credit”

Harry S. Truman