Truman-style shock result is the last thing Obama needs next Tuesday

PUBLIC opinion polls in the United States seem to suggest it is all over bar the shouting. If Barack Obama does not win on Tuesday, it will be the biggest surprise since Harry Truman retained the Presidency exactly 60 years tomorrow.

My grandmother used to tell how she worked for Truman’s opponent, Governor Thomas E Dewey of New York. She felt sorry for Truman because he was a decent man who did not deserve to be hammered, so in the privacy of the voting booth she actually voted for him. She was as sore as she was stunned when he won.

The Chicago Daily Tribune was so sure of the outcome it did not wait for the votes to be counted before it came out with a banner front-page headline: “Dewey Defeats Truman”. It was not the first or the last time the polls got it wrong.

In 1936 the Literary Digest conducted the most exhaustive poll ever. It sent out 10 million questionnaires to the registered owners of cars and those listed in phone directories. On the basis of 2.3 million replies, the magazine concluded that Alf Landon was going to defeat President Franklin D Roosevelt by 57% to 43%.

George Gallup, whose organisation sampled just 50,000 potential voters, on the other hand, concluded Roosevelt would win with 54%. The Literary Digest, which ridiculed Gallup, was laughed out of business when Roosevelt got 64% and won by the biggest landslide since the election of George Washington.

The Literary Digest’s mistake was that it only reflected the views of those people wealthy enough to own a car or a phone at the height of the Great Depression.

But in 1948 Gallup got it badly wrong.

Democrats had been in the White House for the previous 16 years and people seemed ready for change. The Democratic party was split three ways. The liberals bolted to form the Progressive Party, which ran Roosevelt’s former vice-president, Henry Wallace, while the right-wingers chose Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina on the Dixiecrat anti-civil rights ticket.

A bird never flew on one wing, but the Democrats had no wings and Truman was considered a dead duck.

Governor Dewey had such a strong lead that Gallup and the others stopped polling weeks before the election. In the final fortnight Truman barnstormed the country with an enthusiastic campaign, while Dewey played it safe, just following him from city to city.

“When they count the votes that son of a bitch will still be following me”, Truman told his audiences. The Democratic chant was “Give ‘em hell, Harry!” Post-election polls indicated that many people had changed their minds in the final days. This was especially true of those who had earlier intended to vote for the third or fourth party candidates.

George W Bush’s approval rating dropped to 20% this week, the lowest for any president since polling began. As a result he is a millstone around the neck of John McCain, who has been trying to tar Obama with Bush’s economic policies.

During one of the television debates McCain pointed to Obama and complained how “that one” had supported legislation sponsored by Bush.

A large imponderable at this stage is the possible “Bradley effect.” In 1982, Tom Bradley, the black Mayor of Los Angeles, was ahead in the polls in the race for governor of California, but he surprisingly lost. Some people contended this was because people lie to pollsters about supporting a black candidate for fear of being considered racist.

Obama enjoys a double-digit lead in the polls that has been holding steady, so a lot of hypocrites are going to have to come to the rescue to change the outcome on Tuesday.

Truman was back in the news this week when Bush replaced him as the most unpopular president since opinion polling began. Truman’s popularity plummeted after he fired General Douglas MacArthur, the great American war hero.

Truman left the White House with only an army pension of €112 a month. He could have cashed in on his fame. He was offered a number of lucrative directorships, but he declined every one.

“You don’t want me”, he said. “You want the office of the president, and that doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to the American people, and it’s not for sale.”

Truman lived long enough for his greatness to be recognised. Congress voted him a presidential pension and shortly before his death, it was planning to award him the Medal of Honour, the highest award in the United States.

But he wouldn’t have it. “I don’t consider that I have done anything which should be the reason for any award, congressional or otherwise”, he said. He was a politician of real integrity and outstanding moral courage. His exemplary behaviour was something that could and should be emulated in any democracy.

Truman fired MacArthur for trying to provoke a full-scale war with China over Korea, while America still had nuclear superiority. “He’d have had us in the third world war and blown up half to two-thirds of the world”, Truman later said. “I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them, would be in jail”, Truman added. “I fired him because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the president.”

Truman often described the views of his critics as “horse manure”. Once somebody told his wife she should persuade Harry not to use such language. “My dear,” she replied, “you have no idea how long it took me to get him to say ‘manure’.”

Truman stood up to those great all-American hypocrites — senators Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon. During the 1960 campaign he endorsed John F Kennedy and said as far as he was concerned, those who would vote for Nixon, the Republican candidate, “ought to go to hell”.

NIXON denounced the former president for using the word “hell”, which he depicted as bad language. Nixon’s hypocrisy became all the more apparent in 1973 when his own White House tapes were released, littered with “expletives deleted”.

Just as race is the thorny issue being skirted in the present campaign, the elephant in the room in 1960 was Kennedy’s Roman Catholicism. Kennedy skilfully ridiculed Nixon’s complaint about the use of the word “hell” by sending Truman a telegram: “Dear Mr President, I have noted with interest your suggestion as to where those who vote for my opponent should go. While I understand and sympathise with your deep motivation, I think it is important that our side try to refrain from raising the religious issue.”

Our politicians could learn much from Truman, especially those who targeted elderly pensioners in the recent budget. These politicians have not only awarded themselves handsome pensions, they pay themselves pensions while still on the job. And some have gorged themselves on directorships on leaving high office.

“My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician”, Harry Truman once explained. “To tell the truth, there’s hardly any difference. I, for one, believe the piano player job to be much more honourable than current politicians.”