Kamela Harris’s run for the presidency is showing earmarks of the above-the-fray campaign that Thomas E. Dewey mounted for president in 1948, losing what pollsters, pundits and the press then regarded as a can’t-lose race.

The hazy elusiveness that has characterized the first weeks of Harris’s campaign has prompted impatience and criticism from across the political landscape.

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.

To be sure, the similarities between 1948........

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