Handwringing complaints about Obama's failure to talk-tough to Republicans have been a stock-in-trade of a large number of "progressive" critics since early in the primaries. Since Harry Truman, a master of punchy rhetoric is often cited as an example of what "Obama must" emulate, maybe it would be useful to look at the significant progressive victories old Give-em-Hell Harry chalked up during his terms of office.
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Ok. With that out of the way, let's look at his defeats. The two that should most concern us are his failure to stop the Taft-Hartley act that crippled America's labor movement and his epic fail on national health care - a goal that was considered nearly inevitable before Harry bungled it so badly.
There's a pretty decent summary of the Taft-Hartley act in Wikipedia
After the Act, management was allowed to run its company in what it viewed as the most efficient way. The amendments enacted in Taft-Hartley added a list of prohibited actions, or "unfair labor practices", on the part of unions to the NLRA, which had previously only prohibited "unfair labor practices" committed by employers. The Taft-Hartley Act prohibited jurisdictional strikes, wildcat strikes, solidarity or political strikes, secondary boycotts, "common situs" picketing, closed shops, and monetary donations by unions to federal political campaigns. It also required union officers to sign non-communist affidavits with the government. Union shops were heavily restricted, and states were allowed to pass "right-to-work laws" that outlawed union shops. Furthermore, the executive branch of the Federal government could obtain legal strikebreaking injunctions if an impending or current strike "imperiled the national health or safety," a test that has been interpreted broadly by the courts.
Much of this is taken for granted these days, but the effects of this act have been deep and bad. As an example, the prohibition on wild-cat strikes centralized the power of union bureaucracies and lead to the kind of ugly-codependent relationships that induced the UAW and big three to walk together into near total collapse. Before wild-cat strikes were made illegal, union management had to stay out in front of worker concerns instead of becoming guarantors of labor peace - in exchange for a slice of the pie. Furthermore, the outlawing of secondary boycotts made unions unable to pressure strike targets by pushing their customers and suppliers to support the strike.
So where was "take the battle to the Republicans" Harry Truman on this horrible bill? Well, he opposed it, but had become so unpopular and was so ineffective in making his case that enough Democrats joined the Republicans to override his veto.
The same is true of national health insurance - which Truman proposed in 1945 and which was widely regarded as a done deal. If you had gone to the management of the AFL-CIO in 1945 and told them that 63 years later there would be no national health system in the USA and the Unions would represent just a small fraction of US workers - they would have laughed in your face.
Here's the key: Harry Truman's tough talk did not convince the public or the Congress, it was stunningly ineffective. The next time you see some angry screed about Obama's calm tone and conciliatory language, think about the motivation. One thing that is truly remarkable about much of the supposedly leftist criticism of Obama is that the actual results obtained by Truman's confrontational style seem both to be unknown and of zero interest. It is almost as if the critics care more about having their own opinions "validated" by strong talk than they do about winning.