The Truman Factor.(ISSUES & INSIGHTS)(EDITORIALS)(Editorial)

Campaign '04: As the Republicans whoop it up in Gotham, the nation looks to its president for reasons to keep him on the job. Recent public opinion samplings favor George W. Bush over John F. Kerry. Marginally.

Only a few weeks ago the punditry's encrusted view was that the election was the Democrats' to lose. Some desperate Bush supporters urged a go-for-broke, Truman-style campaign, depicting Kerry -- convincingly -- as the invincible Thomas E. Dewey.

Most people know that in 1948 "Give "em hell, Harry" delivered one of the most celebrated upsets in American political history.

Indeed, the Massachusetts senator does resemble the onetime New York governor. Patrician, humorless, stiff, Kerry -- like Dewey -- projects a puritanical rectitude sent to save the republic from a wayward and somehow "illegitimate" president.

Somehow Americans 56 years ago decided to confound the commentators and poll takers. They warmed to the salty-tongued Missourian who mounted an aggressive campaign, not so much against Dewey, but against the Republican "do-nothing Congress." He spelled out bold proposals for health care and civil rights.

Temperamentally Bush is no Harry Truman. He would swallow a bar of soap before sinking to Truman's coarse language. But along with his political maestro Karl Rove, he may be far shrewder than the Fair Deal warhorse.

Never mind the Democrat conspiracy theory that Bush's team manufactured the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Those Vietnam officers sincerely resented calumnies on their service. Their ads have seriously hurt the senator's credibility as a wartime leader.