http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NLDih_5jAIIn 1944, Franklin D. Roosevelt was running for an unprecedented fourth term in office. His opponent was Thomas Dewey, who rose to fame as a prosecutor before becoming Governor of New York. Dewey was at the forefront of what would eventually be known as the Rockefeller Republicans (named after Dewey's successor, Nelson Rockefeller): he was one of the most liberal Republicans in America, supported almost every New Deal program and expanded New York's spending budget astronomically during his tenure. In a sense, domestically, there really was no difference between the Democrats and Republicans in the 1944 election: you had a liberal New York Democrat against a liberal New York Republican. A conservative truly had no dog in the race.
That, of course, did not stop the Democrats from tying Dewey to any right-wing or negative cause they could think of. The clearest illustration of this was the film "Hell-Bent for Election," a 1944 propaganda piece bankrolled by the United Auto Workers labor union and featuring the work of some of the biggest names in Hollywood animation: director Chuck Jones (of
Looney Tunes and later MGM fame), producer John Hubley (founder of UPA, the company responsible for the
Mr. Magoo franchise), and music director Yip Harburg, among many others. The end result of the film was an allegory: Roosevelt (who, in reality, had less than a year to live) is portrayed, in a total departure from reality, as the pristine and gleaming Win the War Special, while Dewey, who to this day is the youngest man to have ever won the Republican nomination for President, is portrayed as a crotchety, sputtering old Defeatist Express, whose train load represented every progressive's caricature of conservatism—tax cuts for the rich, a lack of social programs, stagflation and even Jim Crow (even though, as any history buff knows, Jim Crow was the province of the Democratic Party at the time and it was not until the 1960s, by which point a combination of laws and Warren Court rulings rendered the whole thing moot, that the South flipped Republican). At one point, the old, rich, cigar-smoking caricature of a railroad executive is morphed into a Hitler lookalike. (One of Dewey's biggest legitimate weaknesses was his foreign policy; when he ran in 1940, his non-interventionist stance caused even the Republicans to dump him for Wendell Willkie; when he ran in 1944, he stayed to the script of domestic issues.) Yes, even though Thomas Dewey represented almost all of the same domestic policies that Roosevelt did, the labor unions still portrayed Dewey as an angry right-wing fanatic, which he never was. The end of the film, of course, portrays the dream world of the late 1940s to come: free stuff, free jobs and free everything for everyone!
The same lines of attack are still being used today. No matter what the actual Republican candidate actually stands for, the Democrats will use the same straw man against it. They will always portray conservatism, fiscal restraint and personal discipline as things to be appalled, things that deprive Americans of their free stuff.
My point is this: if the Democrats are going to do this, the Republican Party, as the only viable opposition party in America, needs to have a standard-bearer that is willing to take the opposition head-on and not wilt in the face of attacks—because it doesn't matter how much a RINO panders to Democratic causes; the Democrats will still attack.
