Editorial: Dewey keeps the offensive
Governor Dewey is showing skill as a political campaigner who can take the offense and keep it.
The New Dealers were still sputtering denials to his charge that they fear the problems of peace and demobilization when he let go his haymaker indicting the “planned confusion” of their labor policies. And before they could think up the answers to that one, he hit again by challenging the indispensability of one man, which the New Dealers themselves have chosen as the campaign’s primary issue.
Mr. Dewey used the words of Mr. Roosevelt’s running mate, Mr. Truman: “The very future of the peace and prosperity of the world depends upon his reelection in November.”
And how, asked Mr. Dewey, is a fourth term indispensable to that?
The first essential to peace and prosperity, he said, is unity in our government and unity and strength among our people. But the record shows 12 years of setting “group against group, race against race, and class against class,” labor against employer and labor against labor. And 12 years of quarrelling and bickering among the high-up New Deal administrators.
“An administration which cannot unite its own house even in war can never unite the nation for the tremendous peace tasks ahead of us.”
A second essential to peace and prosperity is “joint, harmonious action between the President and the Congress. Is a fourth term indispensable to that?” Not on the record of 12 years of trying to bring Congress into popular disrepute, 12 years of “executive arrogance toward the elected representatives of the people.” For, said Mr. Dewey:
As a result, no bill which this administration can propose to Congress is today received with anything less than suspicion.
My opponent has demonstrated that he cannot work with the present Democratic Congress. How in the name of the future of our country can he be expected to get along with the Republican Congress which will be elected this fall?
A third essential is “a strong and vigorous America with jobs for all. Is a fourth term indispensable to that?” Not on the record of an administration which, after spending $58 billion through seven peace years, still had 10 million unemployed – and “we had to have a war to get jobs.”
We’ve a hunch the New Dealers will talk less about the indispensable man from here on to Nov. 7.