How disgusting it is that an advertisement for President Roosevelt's re-election campaign is shamelessly referring to the success of this year's D-Day invasion and the recent liberation of Paris in his campaign for re-election!
While it is true that the President took the gutsy decisions that led to the success of the invasion and the many military successes of the last three years, as a Democrat he is expected to unilaterally disarm himself during a presidential election and allow his Republican opponent to attack his integrity and question his patriotism without defending himself by referring to any of the military successes that are to his credit as Commander-In-Chief.
And while -- based on his prior statements calling for the USA to stay out of World War II -- it would normally be very reasonable to question whether his Republican opponent Governor Thomas Dewey would have ordered the D-Day invasion -- to do so in an advertisement in the middle of this 1944 presidential election campaign is unfair and breaks the unwritten rule that Democrats are supposed to turn the other cheek to all attacks on their patriotism and fitness to protect the nation.
It is true that Governor Dewey was an isolationist and non-interventionist, opposed to the US sending any military aid to Britain or fighting the Nazis.
It is also true that Dewey has alleged that President Roosevelt knew ahead of time about the attack on Pearl Harbor.
It is additionally true that Dewey has stated about the President that "instead of being re-elected he should be impeached".
But tradition is tradition. Democrats must always be falsely portrayed as being weak on military matters and national security. And the fact that the Republican Governor's own on-the-record words make it questionable whether he would have ordered American troops to invade Nazi-occupied Europe is immaterial.
President Roosevelt must fight this presidential election with both his hands tied behind his back and give the Republican Governor a chance to obfuscate his isolationist statements that underscore the differences between the Democratic President and the Republican Governor...
And let The Best Man win...
The Democratic President vs The Republican Governor
• This blog was originally written during the presidential election campaign of 1944
• The great Internet outage of 1944 contributed to a slight (68 year) delay in it being published on Huffington Post