Word: deweyitis
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Without one direct word of criticism of Tom Dewey, Harold Stassen made it clear that he thought Dewey had missed the boat by not "talking the issues through to the people." The election, said Stassen, thus was not really a defeat of a "liberal Republican program," because such a program had never really been presented to the people. The Stassen formula: "We need to rebuild the party from the people on up . . .to present a warm and humanitarian approach to the people...
...state-by-state returns with speed and accuracy. But, like everybody else, it had been slow to realize that the vote was going to contradict the opinion polls. Said the New Orleans Times-Picayune's George W. Healy Jr.: "Even when Truman was leading, [A.P.] always put Dewey first, saying he was leading in ten states with say 100 electoral votes, and Truman was leading in 14 states with 280 electoral votes...
Blame from a Reporter. The A.P. had tried to make things clear on election night. At midnight, A.P. Executive Editor Alan Gould had told the New York staff: "Now we must stress the fact that Truman is keeping his lead . . . until now, Dewey has been the story even where he is behind." (Why Dewey was still the story when Underdog Truman was obviously the news, Gould...
...such stories leads them to uses for which they were never intended." Sometimes, he said, the A.P. removes one slant from a story only to give it another: "When [the A.P.'s] Jack Bell reported, "That's the first time I ever had a lunatic engineer," Mr. Dewey said sharply,' the A.P. desk in New York shouldn't have changed 'sharply' to 'facetiously'. . . At what point do you slip over from explanatory reporting and get into opinion, so that you should be run on the editorial page?" Wilbur Cogshall of the Louisville...
...Crossley poll (which predicted a Dewey victory of 49.9%) had discovered an upsurge for Truman in the campaign's closing days, but underestimated it. In a statewide poll just before election, the Chicago Sun-Times found a shift to Truman (but did not trust it enough to print it) which indicated a 50.05% victory in Illinois (the actual vote was 50.68%). Said Editor Richard Finnegan: "This has taught us a poll is no good unless it follows the voter right up to the booth...