Jerry Brown says Mitt Romney reminds him of Tom Dewey.

Mitt Romney says he’s in better shape after the political conventions than he was before because voters know him better now.

The governor of California has a point and Romney is wrong on both counts.

Thomas E. Dewey was the Republican nominee for president twice, once against Franklin Roosevelt and once against Harry Truman. It is the latter election for which Dewey is remembered for he was considered the favorite right up until election day when the victorious Truman held up a copy of a Chicago newspaper with the banner headline “Dewey Defeats Truman.”

Dewey was caricatured as “the man on top of the wedding cake,” stiff, humorless and unable to connect with the common man.  Romney is stiff and humorless and is having trouble connecting with people because he won’t let us get to know him. To the average American Romney is two things: extremely wealthy and Mormon and Romney won’t tell us much more about those two things. He won’t release his tax returns so we can see what he did with all his money, he won’t talk much about his Mormonism, and he’s changed his position on issues like abortion and health care.

The American people do not believe that they know Mitt Romney.  He is not “real” to them.  Real.  A bumper sticker from the 2004 presidential election was “Bush is Real.”  As opposed to John Kerry. Kerry was also a distant man, Americans wondered how “real” his marriage to the former Teresa Heinz was. Kerry said “Who amongst us does not like NASCAR?”  He didn’t like NASCAR and everyone knew it. He was trying to connect with Southern voters, who don't say "amongst," and it wasn’t real.

The incumbent president is half-African and has a funny name but most Americans are half-something, a lot of us have funny names and more and more of us have a skin complexion nearer Obama's. Americans feel they know Barack Obama: married, two kids, lawyer, Christian, basketball fan, sense of humor. We know people like that, we work with them, they’re our friends, we are them.

Mitt Romney says “trust me,” look at how successful I’ve been in life, I will be just as successful as president. It is hard to trust someone you don’t feel you know.  The first polls since the end of the political conventions are starting to come out and Mitt Romney is not in as good a position as before. The president has gotten a bigger “bump.”  For Jerry Brown, for Newt Gingrich who drew the identical parallel to Dewey, for a lot, a lot of Americans Mitt Romney remains the unknown “man on top of the wedding cake.”