ROOSEVELT OR DEwEy ?
By T. M. O'NEILL
AMERICAN election campaigns adhere to a ceremonial pattern as inflexible and unchanging as the rules that govern the games
of childhood, and the figures have been faithfully followed while American manhood engages in more sanguine campaigns around the world. Even the outcome of the current contest seems likely to abide by tradition ; America has never changed an Administration while in a state of war.
Always at the beginning of the campaign the Press pundits are astonished that the populace goes calmly about its workaday busi- ness, exhibiting none of the on-stage excitement of the professionals and disdaining the two-month political fiesta the parties offer them ; then the pundits write in dismay of public apathy and predict solemn things for the future of the democratic system. Only eight weeks ago they were writing thus of the campaign of 1944, and sounding the warning that a minority of the qualified electorate was about to pick the President who would preside over the Government in the fateful years ahead. They wrote the same lines four years and eight years ago, and they were wrong then and they were wrong now— as their hurried revision upward of the anticipated total ballot of next Tuesday now discloses. The truth is never that the voters are seized by apathy in the opening stages of a Presidential card: paign ; it is that the politicians and the political writers get excited too early while the great mass of voters keeps to the objective view that no point lies in getting worked up in September about an elec- tion to be held in November. The voters will attend the polling places on Tuesday in as great numbers as war conditions permit and the importance of the contest warrants. They always do and the professionals always forget.
The apparition of apathy is only the first of the steps of the game. Next there is always the fallacy, assiduously propagated in editorial cubbyholes, that the people are torn and their votes pendant on some .matter of high policy which in those places instantly becomes the " issue " of the campaign. Seldom are more than a handful of the millions of sovereign voters concerned with, or even cognisant of, these high-minded matters ; a case in point was the fiercely contested 19213 election, in which the editorial issue appeared to be the fundamental conflict between the States' rights and centralised govertnnent, but the people who determined the election voted for Hoover because jobs were plentiful, or because his opponent was a Roman Catholic, or because of Prohibition, or because the Demo-
Demo- 3 ,'1944
cratic nominee bore the marks of the big city political machine. Those who voted against Hoover did so because of the contrary of these reasons. Similarly, in the current campaign the " experts" are at grips over the precise degree of authority Mr. Roosevelt or Governor Dewey would give to an American delegate to a projected World Security Council. That is a question likely to sway no more voters among the millions in America than the number who could get' in a polling booth at the same time. A measuring-rod is at hand: all the newspapers in Aftierica have by now taken sides in the election, and one only among the thousands of dailies has switched its allegiance from four years ago because of distinctions between Roosevelt and Dewey on international policy. That pro- portion may be expected among the voters, who will decide, as usual, on the basis of much more personal things—for Roosevelt because of the 4o-hour week, or against him because of govern- mental interference in business ; against him because of disgruntle- ment with a local rationing board, or for him because of approba- tion of the fairness and absence of corruption in the Selective Service Boards which called up the men for. the Services.
Unfailingly, the candidate must assume in his public utterances that his election is assured. Always his promises are phrased
when I am elected," never "if I am elected." Governor Dewey has burnished this ritual by a third person reference to himself befcire campaign audiences as " your next President." It is in com- plete obedience to a political maxim of questionable worth that the American voter is of such faint heart he will lose all interest and stay away from the polls unless assured daily that the candidate of his affection is the Man of Destiny, that he has a curious concept of the value of the ballot in which his only concern is to be on the winning side. Before such monumental rubbish great men bow in awe ; the unwritten rules require it. In compliance, jubilant state- ments will issue from the rival camps next Monday night proclaim- ing the forthcoming victory and—in ccnformity with another bit of prescribed rote—seeking to tidy up some of the dirtier things said and done in the preceding weeks. These are as fixed as the solemn assurances with which each campaign begins, the assurances that under no conceivable circumstance will the campaigner descend to personal abuse of his opponent. That assurance usually goes, into the discard at about the second week of active canvassing. Here falls another step of the electoral minuet ; the candidate who is the incumbent of the office being fought over must pretend to be un- aware of the existence of an opponent and must never, never mention him by name. , There is only a partial restriction in this respect on the opposing candidate, who need limit his terminology for his rival only to meet the language requirements of the postal laws.
Among any hundred American voters in sections where elections are not made a foregone conclusion by geographical and historical prejudice about forty are likely. to be muldoons, those who blindly and unwaveringly vote for one or the other of the major parties because their fathers voted for those parties. =They are beyond swaying and are the backbone of the political organisation, Attending rallies, parading and lending the necessary enthusiasm when the candidates appear. Another forty are almost certainly among the numerous class of semi-independents who are inclined to vote for the same party at each election, but can be driven to vote against a candidate of that party by a grievance that may range from a snub from a bureaucrat to an outrageous departure from decency, such as was represented in one election by a campaign speaker who declared the opposition Presidential nominee to be the candidate of "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion." There remain some twenty voters who may do anything—wait until the last moment to weigh the rival pronouncements on matters of import, or, as happens in every elec- tion, express disgust by going to the polls and leaving the ballot blank. In a normal election the last twenty can deliver the binding judgement.
It is on the twenty that another movement in the campaign ceremonial is based. That is the stage at which the experts start talking of " trends " and of close elections. No evidence has ever been adduced to disclose the late rise of a "trend" in American
election campaigns, and in the absence of evidence they can be dismissed as fictional. An overwhelming majority of voters have been decided for weeks on the vote they will cast, and nothing short of a catastrophic howlei in one camp or the other could induce many of those to give it any further thought. There is evidence on the subject of " dose " elections—they almost never occur. Four years ago the tremendously popular and equally able Wendell Willkie was Mr. Roosevelt's opponent, and on election eve the polls and the prophets pointed to a narrow outcome. Mr. Roosevelt got 449 of the votes in the Electoral College. Mr. Willkie got 82.
Even the honestly conducted straw polls have trouble foretelling the outcome of national elections (a highly respected weekly maga- zine went out of business eight years ago when its poll-takers were deceived on the sweeping and inescapable re-election of Mr. Roose- velt), and the pundits writing from Washington on the basis of what the politicians report from thei; constituencies are hardly ever right. The fact seems to be that America is divided between those who are for Roosevelt and those who are against Roosevelt. In 1940 the opposition put up an attractive candidate and organised a model campaign to bring out every anti-Roosevelt vote that the country could produce. Mr. Roosevelt emerged from the balloting with a popular majority of 5,000,000. In 1944 the opposition has put up a candidate who from across the Atlantic seems certainly no more attractive than Mr. Willkie. The problem posed for next Tuesday seems; then, to turn on a single question: Are there more anti- Roosevelt voters now than then? It would seem unlikely.
Previous page
