[Dean's World] Dean: The Bush-Truman Parallelsq

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Posted by Dean:
The Bush-Truman Parallelsq
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1157217076.shtml


   Daniel Henninger has an interesting piece this week [1]comparing
   President Bush to President Truman. I've long had most of the same
   thoughts, so it's good to see others having noticed. Here's a good
   part:

     The Korean War sat inside the broader context of the cold war,
     which Truman presaged in a stirring speech to Congress in 1947. Mr.
     Bush's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq followed on his strong
     post-September 11 speech to Congress, announcing a new global war
     on terror. Each president in turn promised that the Cold War and
     the war on terror would be long, hard slogs.

     The most interesting Truman ghosts, however, are interred in the
     purely political atmosphere of Washington back then. That tale is
     told in a December article by Steven Casey in the Presidential
     Studies Quarterly titled, "White House Publicity Operations During
     the Korean War, June 1950-June 1951."

     As now, bipartisanship was a shambles. But then it was the GOP that
     dripped venom on a war commitment. Sen. Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska,
     in the role of John Murtha, said of Truman, "The blood of our boys
     in Korea is on his shoulders, and no one else." The Republican
     National Committee built its midterm campaign around "blundering"
     in Korea.

     Here's where it gets interesting: Amid the opposition carping and
     the Democratic Party facing the likelihood of big losses in the
     midterm elections, calls went up from within Truman's party and
     indeed inside the White House to launch a public defense of the
     war. It didn't happen. An anti-Truman slogan of the time asked,
     "Why Korea?" It got no answer.

     Among the reasons Steven Casey adduces for Truman's seeming
     passivity was a belief that it "was unseemly for the head of state
     to be grubbing for votes while American boys were still fighting
     and dying in Korea."

     In any event, the absence of a P.R. counteroffensive cost Truman
     dearly beyond the Democratic congressional losses in 1950. A year
     later, some 66% of Americans wanted to withdraw from Korea, and the
     following year Truman's approval numbers fell to some of the lowest
     levels ever recorded by Gallup, staying below 30% and cratering to
     22% in February 1952. Gen. Eisenhower swept into office in
     November.

   A further interesting historical parallel is to compare this to the
   way Franklin Roosevelt handled similar issues a few years earlier.
   While campaigning in 1944, Republicans were acting pretty much like
   Democrats are acting today: whiny, spoiled, shrieking brats, preaching
   gloom and doom and defeat and failure, some even shrieking "it's
   Roosevelt's war!" In response, Roosevelt hit the campaign trail and
   fought back, and Republicans were (rightly) spanked for their juvenile
   behavior.

   So. While it may be nice to say "don't play politics with the war," it
   may be that in a bipartisan political system that simply isn't
   possible. And it appears that the Bushies have learned the lesson of
   history on that.

References

   1. http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/dhenninger/?id=110008885