OPINION:
The modern political debates, which aren’t really debates at all but questions posed by media celebrities, have nevertheless pushed presidential candidates to the head of the class or consigned some of them to the sidelines, to be discarded flavors of the week.
One such was Harold Stassen, who became a joke for late-night television comics for his 10 attempts to win the Republican presidential nomination. But Mr. Stassen, who died in 2001, was once a very serious candidate indeed, and together with Thomas E. Dewey established the modern presidential debate in 1948.
Mr. Dewey, the governor of New York who had been a federal prosecutor in successful pursuit of the mob, was the favorite of the Republican establishment, but Mr. Stassen won several early primaries. With summer approaching, Mr. Dewey figured he had to win the Oregon primary or quit the race. He challenged Mr. Stassen, “the boy governor” of Minnesota at 31, to debate him in a nationwide radio debate on the eve of the primary in mid-May. There was little television then, except in three or four large cities, and everyone listened to the radio.
Mr. Stassen asked Rep. Walter Judd, the dean of the Minnesota congressional delegation, whether he should accept the challenge.
“I’d be careful,” the congressman replied, “because Tom Dewey clearly knows how to argue to a jury, or he wouldn’t have been able to send a lot of criminals to prison.”
Mr. Stassen, sure of himself and eager to increase his momentum, accepted. There was only one debate question, whether the Communist Party should be outlawed. Mr. Stassen, the most liberal Republican candidate, nevertheless argued that it should be. Mr. Dewey argued a robust no: “You can’t shoot an idea with a gun.” Mrs. Stassen invited several friends to listen with her, and five minutes into the debate, she got up from her chair, turned off the radio, and announced that she was going to bed. Mr. Dewey went on to win the nomination on the second ballot.
Seven years ago Hillary Rodham Clinton looked, as Harold Stassen did in the summer of ’48, like the inevitable nominee as the primaries began with the first of two-dozen Democratic debates. Barack Obama steadily took her measure over the primary season, and won the nomination. Hillary, who has never performed well as a debater, has been leery of debates, and only participates when her handlers and consultants can’t find a plausible explanation to avoid them.
The Republican National Convention in Philadelphia in 1948, where Mr. Stassen finished third behind Tom Dewey and Sen. Robert A. Taft of Ohio, was prescient in one important way. An obscure state party chairman, Osro Cobb of Arkansas, was recruited to second the Stassen nomination. His remarks were more a plea than a second, describing the South as “the last frontier to which we can turn for substantial gains for our party — gains that can be held in the years to come. There is a definite affinity between the Southern farmer and the grass-roots Midwestern Republican. Our party simply cannot indulge the luxury of a Solid South, handed on a silver platter to the Democrats every four years.” The rest, as they say, is history.
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