“It looks like President Obama really has found his inner Harry Truman"

[jefferson_dem]

Can Obama win by channeling Harry Truman?
By Adam Serwer

That’s the pundit prescription of the moment, and it appears that Obama may be following it. Yesterday, the president gave a speech in Michigan railing against “Congress” for failing to undertake meaures to fix the economy, and he’s reiterating those points today. It’s true that Obama tends to refrain from targeting Republicans by name, preferring to hammer Congress in general. But as Jonathan Cohn points out, Obama yesterday also gave a strong defense of government:

You’ll hear a lot of folks, by the way, say that government is broken. Well, government and politics are two different things. Government is our troops who are fighting on our behalf in Afghanistan and Iraq. That’s government. Government are also those FEMA folks when there’s a flood or a drought or some emergency who come out and are helping people out. That’s government. Government is Social Security. Government are teachers in the classroom. Government are our firefighters and our police officers, and the folks who keep our water clean and our air clean to breathe, and our agricultural workers. And when you go to a national park, and those folks in the hats -- that’s government.

Cohn added that “It looks like President Obama really has found his inner Harry Truman, at least for the moment.”

Harry Truman, who ran against an unpopular “do-nothing Congress” like the one we have today, is kind of the patron saint of unpopular presidents seeking reelection — one whose defeat seemed so certain that a newspaper announced his opponent had won when he hadn’t. But as Brendan Nyhan notes, Truman isn’t a particularly good example of a president defying the sort of economic headwinds Obama faces today. At the time GPD was growing at more than six percent — which would ba an absolute miracle given the state of the economy today. As Nyhan writes, “while the idea of the underdog Truman fighting against the “Do Nothing Congress” sounds inspiring, the success of Truman’s re-election campaign was driven by the state of the economy.”

So we don’t know if the Truman prescription will really work for Obama. The question is, at a time when the economy is terrible, is it possible for Obama to foist the blame on to Congress, and by implication on to Republicans?

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line

[ClarkUSA]

1. Go for it. The GOP Congress approval numbers are at record lows. Hammer that nail!

[OHdem10]

2. If he can only utter Congress, means he is blaming Dems as well

as Republicans. He did not say Republicans yesterday.



Give'em Hell, Harry went directly after those do notheing
Republicans.

Blaming Congress hurts Democrats on the Hill.

[Davis_X_Machina]

5. There are plenty of Senate Democrats...

...for starters, who need to be castigated as much as any Republican.

They're why your stimulus was 1/3 tax cuts. That's what killed your public option. That's where the refusal to fund the closure of Gitmo happened.

It's deliberate. The man chooses his words extremely carefully.

[Davis_X_Machina]

3. Yawn. This is DU. Wake me up....

...when he announces property is theft, or something.

[infidel dog]

4. Ye gads, I'd turn cartwheels with joy if Mr. Obama took HST for his political inspiration.

[hootinholler]

7. I'm inspired by Hunter Thompson as well

Lots of good books, but I'm not sure I want our President emulating him.

Then again, maybe we do.

-Hoot

[FrenchieCat]

6. I think he will start using "republicans" closer to when folks are actually paying attention......

it will be one of those one, two, three, score situation.
He is lulling the Republicans into believing he will be passive,
and so they will underestimate him when the time comes.
I'm not calling it chess, cause that ain't what it is;
political strategy 2012.

[Vidar]

8. Harry Truman never had any trouble acting, even when his actions

were unpopular. Obama only talks about acting.

[Jakes Progress]

9. + 100 You got it.

[alcibiades_mystery]

12. You do know that Truman was so despised by the American left that they

launched a laughable third party campaign against him, under the banner of Henry Wallace, yes?

The left had good reason to despise Truman, in any case. He was an utter quisling coward on the question of the conservative-produced Red Scare of the late 1940's and early-1950's, buckling under and caving so completely to the McCarthyites that he destroyed the left's infrastructure for almost 15 years. If you want to know why the strong Left of the 1930's evaporated, you need only assess Truman's pathetic complicity with the red baiting Republicans.

[Hart2008]

13. +200 There is no comparison between the two! NT

[bemildred]

10. We need something "outer", not "inner". nt

[alcibiades_mystery]

11. Maybe we can have a disastrous Henry Wallace-esque campaign from our "progressive" friends

:rofl: