What Obama Can Learn from FDR

With her claim that his “support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans is weakening again,” Hillary Clinton seems determined to goad Barack Obama into a last-ditch, bare-knuckle fight for the Democratic party presidential nomination. In the wake of her 67-to-26 percent route of Obama in West Virginia, Clinton’s strategy is not surprising.

While 70 percent of voters say Clinton is tough enough to make the choices confronting a president and 71 percent say John McCain is, only 58 percent say that about Obama, according to a recent New York Times-CBS News Poll.

Clinton’s challenge is sure to get the attention of Democratic party loyalists. This time around, they want a tough guy running for the presidency. They remember that in 1988 the furloughed, black convict Willie Horton and the Pledge of Allegiance issue undid Michael Dukakis, and that in 2004, John Kerry never recovered from the charge by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that he was not an authentic Vietnam War hero.

Obama’s reluctance to employ what he disdainfully calls “negative attacks” could help make him Republican victim number three in 2008. But the Dukakis and Kerry precedents are not the only ones that Democrats should keep in mind. They need to look further back in history than ten years ago. The classic lesson in how to deal with a political smear is the one that President Franklin Roosevelt, the greatest Democratic vote getter of all time, delivered in 1944.

In that election FDR found that even after leading the country through the great Depression and to the brink of victory in Second World War, he could not afford to remain aloof when criticized. In America’s first wartime election since 1864, FDR’s Republican opponent Thomas Dewey was able to make gains by criticizing the “tired old men” running the country. The most potentially damaging smear that Roosevelt was subjected to in 1944 was that on a trip to visit American troops on the Aleutian Islands he had left Fala, his beloved Scottie, behind. At tax-payer expense, the Republican story went, Roosevelt had ordered a destroyer to go back and pick up Fala. The charge reinforced the Republicans’ assertion that in running for a fourth term FDR had come to think of himself as a president for life who did not have to play by the same rules as everyone else.

FDR knew that he could not afford to ignore the Fala accusation. Aloofness on his part only gave the charge more credibility. So early in the fall of 1944 he went on the offensive. At a September 23 Teamsters dinner in Washington, FDR struck back at his Republican accusers, but he did so with a counterattack that was the opposite of the take-no-prisoners approach that Barack Obama is now being encouraged to adopt in his presidential campaign.

FDR’s weapon of choice in 1944 was mockery. “I don’t resent, and my family doesn’t resent attacks,” he assured the Teamsters. But Fala was a different story, the president then went on to say. “Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that I had left him behind on the Aleutian Island s and had sent a destroyer back to find him–at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars–his Scotch soul was furious,” FDR observed. “He has not been the same dog since.”

The Teamsters howled with laughter. Here was the president saying that the Republicans’ phony charge was too preposterous to hurt him, but insisting that such a charge could affect his dog’s feelings. The president would not stoop to defend himself, but he would stand up to defend his dog’s honor. Laughter was what FDR was after and having won it, he turned it into political gold.

“I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself–such as that old, worm-eaten chestnut that I have represented myself as indispensable,” FDR told the Teamsters. “But I think I have a right to resent, to object to libelous statements about my dog.”

The Fala smear was over as quickly as it had begun. Roosevelt’s irony carried the day. He had pitted his accusers against his dog and in a single evening deprived them of the dignity they needed to continue their attack. It was a case of wag the dog in reverse.

Barack Obama does not bring to the 2008 presidential campaign the credentials that FDR possessed in 1944. But FDR’s Fala gambit, we need to remember, did not hinge on him presenting himself as a great man. It hinged on him exposing the politics of distraction without replicating his opponents’ viciousness. FDR’s point was that in 1944 the United States had a war to conclude and a peace-time international order to build. The country could not afford to let itself get caught up in side issues.

Roosevelt was betting that voters would be able to separate the serious from the distraction. It was a bet that he won six weeks after his Teamsters speech, sweeping to victory by an electoral vote margin of 432 to 99. Sixty-four years later with two wars, a health care crisis, and a collapsed housing-market, it is still reasonable to think that voters will be able to separate what is politically serious from what is a distraction.

In the coming weeks, Barack Obama will certainly have to explain in greater detail than ever the post-racial world he believes in and how he is different from the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. But as FDR’s example shows, such explaining can succeed without a savage attack on the opposition. The lessons of the master apply to more than just the master.

Nicolaus Mills, a professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College, is author of Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower. Photo: Raul654.