Barack H. Dewey

Barack H. Dewey



By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Thursday, October 23, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Election '08: Barack Obama's certainty about winning betrays the same arrogance found in his socialist ideology. "President Dewey" learned the hard way that Americans reject candidates who count their chickens.


How sad to be remembered by history for telling voters, "Your future is still ahead of you." New York Republican Gov. Thomas Dewey's snatching of defeat from the jaws of victory in his 1948 run against Harry Truman was filled with many such platitudes.

But were Dewey's vacuities any less empty and meaningless than "At this moment, in this election, we must pledge once more to march into the future"? This is how Sen. Obama — promoted as the greatest orator of our time — closed his convention stadium speech.

Or his infamous "We are the ones we've been waiting for"? Or even his campaign's monosyllabic slogan, "Change," emblazoned on the fuselage of Obama's campaign jet. (What do they call it, Air Force The One?)

Saying a whole bunch of nothing with a nice ring to it is not the only way Obama is copying "the little man on the wedding cake," as the ever-witty Alice Roosevelt Longworth referred to Dewey. Obama has also been acting as if he's got the presidency in the bag.

"I feel like we got a righteous wind at our backs here," he told a northern Virginia crowd Wednesday.

In Chicago, construction has already begun for a $2 million Obama fest for Election Night at Grant Park on the shore of Lake Michigan, in spite of Democratic Mayor Richard Daley warning that it would be a logistical nightmare and suggesting another venue.

Then there was his "national security council meeting" in Richmond, where advisers "prepared" him for the foreign policy challenges of the Obama administration. And Obama economic advisers are "already in constant touch" with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.

In his book "With Reagan," Edwin Meese recalled Ronald Reagan making a point of avoiding overconfidence at the end of the 1980 campaign when it was clear that he would beat Jimmy Carter.

Reagan knew, according to Meese, that "planning to govern before being elected would smack of smugness and have a negative effect on the electorate," and he "constantly worried about being a latter-day Thomas Dewey."

Imagine how Reagan would go after Obama for his arrogance — which extends to his misguided policies to tax the investment that drives the economy, mask tax credits as welfare, spend hundreds of billions more annually and use talk to win the global war on terror.

In his inimitable style, Reagan would no doubt warn Obama that that "righteous wind" he feels could soon become a head wind, and blow all his hot air right back into his face.