Gyroscopic Investing

Any of this sound familiar??!!

Vinny



The night of Dewey’s Chicago speech, Truman arrived in Cleveland, where he had a special message he had been saving for just the right moment. The message was for the newspapermen and the pollsters who had been reporting on his perceived failures through the entire campaign and for most of his presidency.

By Truman’s estimation, 90 percent of the daily newspapers were against him. The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Star, the two biggest papers in his home state of Missouri—the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Kansas City Star—all had endorsed Dewey. Over the past few months, newspaper columnists had leveled every insult imaginable at the president. That very week, the Los Angeles Times would call Truman “the most complete fumbler and blunderer this nation has seen in high office in a long time.” Also that very week, the Chicago Daily Tribune would call him “an incompetent” and worse. The columnist Westbrook Pegler had called Truman “a sorry and pathetic squirt,” “the little squealer who broke the rules,” and “a tacky county commissioner in a scene of historic humiliation.”

As Truman saw it, the newspapers and radio stations were “operated, or subsidized by the same private interests that always benefited from Republican economic policies,” he later wrote. He resented “the commonplace practice of distorted editorials and slanted headlines in the press and of outright misrepresentation in the daily offerings of the columnists and commentators. The worst offense of all was the editing and distorting of the facts in the news.”

Truman saw the inner workings of the media as a conspiracy to favor one candidate over another using what amounted to fake news. It was the pollsters who had done the most damage, and it was the pollsters whom Truman attacked on the night of October 27, before a packed Cleveland Municipal Auditorium:

Now, these Republican polls are no accident. They are part of a design to prevent a big vote, to keep you at home on November 2nd, by convincing you that it makes no difference whether you vote or not. They want to do this because they know in their hearts that a big vote spells their defeat. They know that a big vote means a Democratic victory, because the Democratic Party stands for the greatest good for the greatest number of the people. The special interests now running the Republican Party can’t stand a big vote—they are afraid of the people. My friends, we are going to win this election.

The next night, the Dewey Victory Special rolled in for a gala event in the same hall. It was packed, and the crowd stood for an ovation lasting three minutes and twenty seconds. Dewey attacked Truman for using divisiveness for his own political gain. The Dewey-Warren campaign, the Republican candidate said, had “not been guilty of using our high responsibility to rip our country apart or to arouse fear or prejudice. We will win this campaign and we will win it by clean and decent methods.”

Dewey then blamed the administration’s foreign policy failures for the Cold War. “In a little more than three years,” he said, “the Soviet Union has extended its sway nearly half way around the world and now rules more than five hundred million human beings.”

By almost all accounts, Dewey’s speech was a hit. Senator Arthur Vandenberg gushed in a letter to the candidate the next day: “Your Cleveland speech was one of the greatest of our time.”

And what of the pollsters themselves? George Gallup’s first reaction was that the people who accounted for his polling numbers did not show up at the voting booths, because they assumed Dewey had it won. “Which voters stayed home?” he asked his readers, rhetorically. Elmo Roper was the pollster who stopped polling altogether weeks before the election because, he claimed, Dewey was “as good as elected,” so there was no more point in taking polls. Now Roper had this to say: “I could not have been more wrong and the thing that bothers me at the moment is that I don’t know why I was wrong.”

One theory emerged that the pollsters erred in their sampling process, that they failed to do enough to tally the opinions of low-income voters who were less approachable and more likely to be suspicious of poll takers. In the end, these voters came out for Truman. Another, more valid theory supported Gallup’s excuse: that Dewey voters were so confident, they did not bother to vote. Numbers backed up this claim; Dewey drew about forty thousand fewer total votes than he had four years earlier against FDR. The logical conclusion was that some Republican voters stayed home because they thought their vote did not matter. How many of them later regretted that decision?

“It’s open season on the pollsters,” Edward R. Murrow said over CBS radio. “But it ought to be pointed out that they are accused of nothing except being wrong. No one claims, so far as I know, that they were ‘bought’ or that they deliberately attempted to influence the outcome by contributing to despondency and alarm, or by inducing complacency in the Republican ranks. They were just wrong, and in the field of information and ideas this is no crime.”