JOSEPH CAMPBELL IN JULY: Is Kamala setting herself up for a Dewey-versus-Truman defeat?

While noting the distance Harris has kept from the news media — she has neither granted an interview nor convened a news conference since emerging as the Democrats’ nominee — the New York Times nonetheless reported recently: “Some political strategists say Ms. Harris is doing exactly what she should be doing.”

Perhaps it’s not “exactly what she should be doing,” though — not when recalling campaign history and the case of Dewey, who served three terms as Republican governor of New York but twice lost the presidency as his party’s nominee.

Dewey in 1948 embraced a distant, glide-path strategy against President Harry Truman (D), sidestepping controversy and offering tame platitudes such as the importance of national “unity.”

“When you’re leading, don’t talk,” Dewey told a supporter, according to his biographer.

He specifically rejected suggestions by Republican leaders to undertake a vigorous, hard-hitting effort against Truman, who had become president in 1945 upon the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

“I will not get down into the gutter with that fellow,” Dewey said of Truman.

The last days of Kamala’s campaign seemed somewhat reminiscent of Harry Truman’s 1948 campaign, when Truman, struggling in the polls, went all out smearing Thomas Dewey with the F-word, which ultimately helped earn Harry his legendary “Dewey Defeats Truman” photo. But that would have seemed shocking just three years after the end of WWII, especially coming from the man who had ended it. 76 years later, after every Republican presidential nominee since has been declared a Nazi, the attack has lost its punch, especially after Kamala and Biden played footsie with those with a similarly vicious antisemitic bent.