GOVERNOR THOMAS DEWEY’S IRISH WAKE STORY

After Senator Hillary Clinton’s third place finish in the Iowa caucuses, few people—including me—thought she would win the New Hampshire Primary, but she did. Her victory embarrassed nine well respected polling organizations whose findings predicted she would be beaten by Senator Barack Obama and maybe even by Senator John Edwards. Now the red-faced pollsters are licking their wounds and trying to figure out how they could be so wrong.

This incident reminded me of the 1948 presidential election when the voters could choose either President Harry Truman or Governor Thomas Dewey of New York. The pollsters were almost unanimous in predicting that Dewey would be the winner. Liberty Magazine, a well known weekly, predicted Dewey would win handily. That evening, radio commentator H. V. Kaltenborn told his national audience that Governor Dewey had won the election. The Chicago Tribune early morning edition’s front page headline announced: “Dewey Defeats Truman.”

What a surprise it was to Dewey and most voters to wake up and learn that Truman had been re-elected. Liberty magazine lost so many subscribers that it closed down and soon H. V. Kaltenborn was off the air.

At a post-election dinner a few weeks later Governor Dewey, who did not have a great sense of humor, told a large audience how he felt the next morning when he discovered he had lost.

He told the story of a man who got drunk at an Irish Wake. His friends decided they would play a trick on him by persuading the funeral director to let them borrow a casket. They put their drunken friend in the casket and let him sleep there the rest of the night. When the victim awakened in the morning, he was sober but very confused.

He said. “If I am alive, why am I laid out in this coffin? And if I am dead, why do I have to go to the bathroom?”

Dewey, who did not have a great sense of humor, brought the house down with that story. Had he told more humorous stories instead of relying on polls during the campaign, he might have beaten Truman.

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