The Truman Show

Barack Obama is channeling Harry S. Truman. His Midwest bus tour, denouncing Congress at each stop, is a virtual carbon copy of Truman’s whistle-stop denunciation of the 80th Congress. And as such, it’s in line with American Enterprise Institute moderate Norman Ornstein’s recommendation to Obama, published in the New Republic:

the President can [follow] a precedent from 64 [sic] years ago: Harry Truman’s campaign for reelection in 1948—successful, despite a poor economic climate, and a polarized electorate—offers a promising path for Obama’s reelection. . . the Republicans [a]s historian William Leuchtenburg put it, “veered so sharply to the right that they alienated one segment of the electorate after another. They antagonized farmers by slashing funds for crop storage; irritated Westerners by cutting appropriations for reclamation projects;” and, . . . by pushing the anti-union Taft-Hartley legislation over Truman’s veto, they drove a labor movement furious with Truman back into the president’s arms.

[Truman realized] that the hyper-partisan Congress was as much a political boon as it was a political liability. Truman seized upon the conservative over-reaching and openly fought against what he dubbed the “Do-Nothing Eightieth Congress.” That rhetorical strategy paid dividends, as voters rebelled against the ideologues and the Democratic base was energized to elect a president they had long disparaged and opposed. . . “The luckiest thing that ever happened to me,” Truman remarked years later, “was the Eightieth Congress.” [For Obama,] the absence of an energized and angry president demanding better of the do-nothings in Congress can only lead to something worse.

To me, it looks like Obama is jumping the gun a bit. Truman didn’t coin the term “do-nothing” Congress until after the congressional special session he called adjourned August 7, 1948, and his whistle-stop train tour denouncing the Congress didn’t begin until September 17, 1948, six weeks before the election (David McCullough, Truman, pp. 652, 654). Obama’s bus tour is 14 months before the election, and much closer to Congress’s opening than to its close. Shouldn’t the president wait a bit? Or is he just too eager for the “Truman Show” to end, the one that closed with “Give ‘em Hell” Harry’s all-time upset presidential win?

Conservative Michael Barone, in a Washington Examiner article entitled “Harry S. Obama?”, also takes on the Obama-Ornstein parallel to Truman, but from a different, more substantive, angle. Barone writes about the agricultural policy (in a time when much more of the country lived in farm areas) and foreign policy advantages 1948 Truman had over our current president.