Harry Truman won by talking to us, and this new study by Zachary Karabell offers plenty of evidence.

During Truman’s 1948 whistle-stop presidential campaign, his wife Bess read mystery novels as the Ferdinand Magellan’s train cars hurled along between stops at 100 miles an hour. Daughter Margaret sat at his side reacting to word changes he made in a pile of speeches resting on his lap.

Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief, Ernest Lindley, was appointed maestro for the first-ever-televised broadcast of presidential election returns. For three of that year’s four political conventions, the chosen Mecca was Philadelphia since AT&T had laid most of its television cable along the East Coast. The City of Brotherly Love was the welcoming site for Democrats, Republicans, and Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party. On the floor of the Democratic Convention, Sen. Strom Thurmond led a revolt against then-Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey’s civil rights platform. Later in the year his States’ Rights Party met in Alabama. Besides mainstream voting blocks, about 420,000 votes were cast for candidates of smaller parties including Prohibitionists thirsting for dry days and a cadre of Socialist fellow travelers. Political diversity was fashionable.

A young lady around Margaret Truman’s age, Philadelphia’s Theresa McGlinchey Zammiello, had been selected to play a more public role than Margaret’s quiet speech vetting. Margaret, like her mother, chastely shunned publicity. A Catholic school graduate, Theresa was chosen to be one of the "election girls" to scurry behind Lindley on camera. She and her curved bevy had no official duties other than to look good, follow stage directions, and encourage rather than thwart glimpses of themselves reflected in blinding paten leather pumps. In alternating groups, the election girls, barely legal political T&A, wiggled from stage mark A across to stage mark B in their smart outfits. In essence, they were portraying on national television Marshall McCluhan’s later admonition that " the medium is the message". In contrast to today’s televised, electoral beauty contests, that year’s presidential election allowed for real citizen soapbox. For example, Truman’s famed "Give "em Hell, Harry" was actually coined by him from an angry voter’s cheer made during one of his many whistle stops. A move from real to cyber elections forms the genesis of what Zachary Karabell calls "The Last Campaign: How Truman Won the 1948 Election".

For Karabell, the four-party convention year of 1948 marks the turning point when television news’ takeover of politics separated real voters from 3-D candidates they could evaluate in person. By 1952, network news, already based on ratings and advertising during its short, 22-minute nightly broadcasts, forced anchormen’s dialogue (there were no females, except girls like Theresa flouncing around like erotic tinsel) into several thousand crafted words. The modern sound bite was spanked on its eight-minute per half hour-advertised bottom while television producers severed its umbilical chord from meaningful public debate.

In many ways, Truman fought for his political life after moving into the Oval Office upon Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death. He now had the chance to run in his own right - after taking unpopular positions against a brewing political homogeny gaining ground in the Cold War’s early days. He ran against a former district attorney (I’d like to add up all the DA’s who’ve run for higher office) and governor of New York, Thomas E. Dewey. Truman’s patrician opponent politely coasted, not wanting to soil himself in the process of taking hold of an office he deemed his "entitlement", an awkward thought for Republicans then and now, given as they are to critical analysis of entitlement programs such as food stamps as the real choker of the Republic’s breath rather than, let’s say, corporate welfare and unregulated soft-money campaign contributions.

Confidence breeds indifference to reality. Truman beat Dewey by 2.1 million votes. Pennsylvania, referred to by former Governor Robert Casey’s maverick political advisor James Carville during his mid-1980s campaign for Casey as the State of Alabama without the black folk, voted for Dewey. Etched into baby boomer minds is a photograph of Truman at his train balcony displaying perhaps the most embarrassing headline ever written, by the Chicago Daily Tribune, "Dewey Defeats Truman". Although wrong in 1948 about the mood of a public they were sure would install Dewey on Pennsylvania Avenue in a landslide, Karabell thinks that network news began that year to deny public debate in any future presidential campaigns.

Although era defining, the campaign wasn’t humorless. With Mrs. Dewey on his arm outside (coincidentally) New York’s Roosevelt Hotel, he said he knew of at least two votes bagged. Having said in public that she’d enjoy sleeping with the president, Mrs. Dewey asked her defeated husband over breakfast the day following the election if Harry was coming over to their place or was she to report to the White House. But sometimes a joke well intended turns sour by the time we reach the punch line. What Theresa McGlinchey Zammiello started in full view of the public, Monica Lewinsky finished privately within the walls of the Oval Office. Instead of a diversified debate by candidates who actually perspire, voters are faced with a long row of Campbell’s soup cans that could have been expropriated by Warhol, different only in their finer details not easily detected even close up.

In support of Karabell’s thesis, by the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon televised debate the public had grown fearful of 5-o’clock shadows, Nixon’s and their own. Most people who listened to the debate on radio thought Nixon won. Most television viewers thought Kennedy won. He looked better. Didn’t sweat a lot like poor Richard did in all his humanity under those hot lights. Kennedy broke his promise and wore make up. Nixon didn’t. Kennedy walked on stage in electoral drag ready to perform while voters stuffed dollar bills into his skivvies. As RuPaul once said: "We’re all born naked sweetheart. And from there on out everything’s drag." The American presidential election system needs a new outfit. For Karabell, Truman won the 1948 election by speaking directly to voters from the back of a train in his simple cloth suits.