Give ’Em Hell, Barry

What Barack Obama can learn from Harry Truman’s inspired use of partisanship.

Harry Truman, giving ’em hell. | The Strange Death of Liberal America

Robert Kuttner, The American Prospect | Full Story | When President Barack Obama took office, at a time of grave financial crisis and disgraced laissez-faire economics, many of us hoped that he would be the next Franklin D. Roosevelt. That hope, to put it mildly, has not materialized. In fairness to Obama, he took office while the crisis was still deepening. FDR, by contrast, was inaugurated after the depression had festered and Republicans had dithered for more than three years, creating a popular mandate for more drastic change.

But if Obama is not destined to be the next Roosevelt, he can choose from one of two very different presidential role models, Harry Truman or Bill Clinton. When Clinton lost his congressional majority in the 1994 midterm elections, he moved emphatically to the center. He saved his own presidency by positioning himself almost as a president above party—the famed strategy of "triangulation." But he did a lot of damage to Democrats along the way, suggesting that they were somehow too left-wing for the country.

Truman took a different route. When Republican obstruction of his policies was unrelenting and his own popularity was near an all-time low, he recovered by becoming an effective partisan and a resolute progressive. He not only saved his own presidency in the great election upset of 1948 but enabled Democrats to take back Congress in one of the largest vote swings in American political history. With the 1948 election, the House went from 246 Republicans and 188 Democrats to 263 Democrats and 171 Republicans, a net pickup of 75 seats for the Democrats.

Today, Republicans have made clear that they will settle for nothing less than the destruction of the Obama presidency. The common ground that Obama has sought is not to be had. But even as Obama is belatedly rejecting the illusion of bipartisanship, the usual suspects are urging him to move closer to the GOP. >>

Published 10.03.30 20:24:22 -0500 GMT | Posted by Andrew Garib on 10.03.30 | |