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Another most important new face was that of Keynoter Earl Warren, Governor of California, a big, reassuring man, who told the convention: "We are here to do a job for the American people. To get the boys victoriously back home; to open the door to jobs and opportunity; to make a peace that this time will be lasting. That is what the American people expect the Republican Party to accomplish. That is why, in so many streams of late, they have been changing so many horses. . . . We do not propose to deny the progress that has been made during the last decade. Neither do we aim to repeal it. Whatever its source, if it is good we will acknowledge it. If it is sound we will build on it. We do not aim to turn the clock back and make an issue of every administration mistake in the past eleven years."
But the new element in the Party that mattered most was Candidate Tom Dewey. He came into a position almost unique in U.S. political history—he owed none of the political debts that usually hang on a candidate's neck like so many albatrosses (e.g., the 1932 Roosevelt debt to Messrs. John Garner and William McAdoo for wrecking Al Smith).
In short, Dewey wore no man's collar. (His own choice in collars might seem a bit unfashionably stiff, but the U.S. would get used to that.) Thus unencumbered, he could move with absolute precision, unhampered by due bills, to the tasks ahead.
The first of those tasks, it was well known, would be to revitalize his own Party, weeding out the old troops and putting them on garrison duty. The second would be to train the new younger troops for the G.O.P.'s great assault on Franklin Roosevelt's political fortress.
* In the last preconvention Gallup poll among Republicans, Dewey's strength fell 7%, Bricker's went up 3%, in the past month. But Dewey still had an overwhelming 38%