Obama must now lead the Democratic Party in preparation for the 2016 general election. In similar circumstances, Harry Truman engineered a winning strategy that could work for the Democratic nominee in 2016. Truman very deliberately forced the all-Republican Congress to shoot itself in both feet. On election day, 1948, Truman surprisingly beat the Republicans and flipped both houses of Congress to Democratic majorities with his coattails.
Obama, the Clintons, and the DNC are studying Truman's strategies because the political circumstances of 2016 are quite similar to 1948's. How did Harry Truman do it?
Liberals lament Obama’s passivity. Conservatives are angered by his use of Executive Orders, considering him dangerously aggressive. I think he’s just right. He advances his cause against well-organized opposition like a Zen Master - pushing where he senses a soft spot, sidestepping headlong attacks, choosing inaction when it will have a positive effect, alert to his enemies’ movements. Forget the issues for a moment and think about him dispassionately as a practitioner of the democratic arts.
Becoming a President, at his age, with an Arabic sounding name, as an African American, was a stunning accomplishment. It did not happen by accident. It happened by his design and under his command. His rapid rise to power will be studied by historians for generations. He took the Democratic Party leadership. So forgot whether he has disappointed you or pissed you off and simply admire his skill. And lets hope he uses those skills to maximum advantage in his dealings with the 114th, Republican Congress.
If you read his books, particularly the Audacity of Hope, he explains himself. Politics, for him, is an intellectual challenge. He can look at five sides of an issue, then explain which levers of power have to be pushed to achieve what is achievable. He explains any state of affairs with a deep understanding of the historical foundations of American institutions. He writes like a writer, not like a politician or an academic. And he speaks as well as he writes. He is the whole package.
The next Democratic nominee for President runs a serious risk by comparison with Obama. In Truman's case, the comparison with the great FDR was ridiculous. Whoever succeeds Obama as the Democratic Party Nominee won't seem nearly as insignificant by comparison.
Harry Truman was a loser, so said every pundit and pollster. He was certainly no FDR, the giant who’d led the country and the Democratic Party through the Great Depression and through most of the Second World War. And Obama’s successor will be in his shadow, at least until election day 2016.
So Truman had the disadvantage of not being FDR, but had an advantage that the next Democratic Candidate will not have - he was the sitting President leading up to the Presidential election. But, as will be the case with whomsoever the Democrats nominate in 2016, he was unfavorably compared to his predecessor. FDR was a sainted memory for Democrats, Truman was merely an uninspiring caretaker. But, in spite of his lack of charisma and meager reputation, he engineered an absolutely brilliant campaign based on his approach to Congressional opposition.
The course Truman followed may be repugnant to many who value ideological purity over practical politics, but he very deliberately positioned his 1948 campaign by his actions with regard to an antagonist Congress. Like Obama in his final final two years, Truman was President when both houses of Congress were majority Republican. As is the current 114th Congress, the 80th of 1946-1948 was obstructionist. They were intent on cutting the budgets of as many New Deal programs as they could, as they will attempt to do with Obamacare. They held up Democratic legislation in Committee. Worse they were able to override Truman’s many vetoes, having formed a strong Congressional partnership with Southern Democrats. It was as dysfunctional a Congress as our current one.
Truman realized that their overrides and inaction were their soft spot. He ran against the 80th Congress in 1948, more forcefully than he ran against the overly optimistic Tom Dewey. His campaign was a daily, aggressive, in-your-face (Give ‘em hell, Harry!) attack not only on the passivity of the Congress, but on the rich people to whom they were beholden. It was class warfare and political warfare. On domestic issues, he knew that his was by far a more popular position than the tired Government reduction rhetoric of the Republicans. It still is.
The Republicans believe that foreign policy is their strength, a way to counter the Democrats’ domestic policy advantage. Truman’s strategies negated any Republican advantages in foreign affairs. He did two things. The first one is likely to be a turnoff for some liberals, but it was essential to Truman’s strategy.
First he positioned himself as far to the right as he could by being vociferously against the evil of his day – Soviet communism. The 2016 Democratic Party can now choose to be as extreme in the ways its candidates characterize the evil of militant Islam. If they adopt Truman’s strategy, they will be over-the-top, loudly, and consistently anti-evil, characterizing ISIS and their ilk as threats to the American (Judeo Christian) Way of Life. Truman’s rhetoric was so extreme that he actually forced the far left wing of his Party to break off and form the Progressive Party, who nominated Henry Wallace, an advocate for diplomatic solutions to the Russian menace. This benefited Truman’s campaign by establishing distance from the extreme left.
2016’s Democrats, if they follow Truman’s example, must endorse military options in general, implicitly accepting ownership of the military, as it is critical to our foreign policies and a source of national pride. They must seem ready to launch a strike if provoked. They should stay away from tactical arguments, and make the conversation about us-vs-them because they are evil and we are “freedom loving Americans”. If the Democratic Candidate appears in any way “soft on Islam”, his or her election prospects will be poor. Truman understood that voters need to have their notions of good and evil personified by their President. In his day, the evil was Communism. In ours, it’s militant Islam.
The second thing Truman did was co-opt the Republican foreign policies by making them support Democratic initiatives in Congress. They, at long last, had abandoned isolationism and voted to fund the Marshall Plan. They sensed, accurately, that postwar America had rejected isolationism and supported engagement through the UN, NATO, and by containing Soviet advances. They had to vote to use American tax dollars to rebuild shattered Europe. If they had said no, the Republicans would have been seen as squandering America’s WWII victories.
In 1948, Republicans wanted to beef up the Armed Forces with a draft, so Truman sent them a bill authorizing a modest call-up. He offered DOD candy in budget proposals. Truman did everything in his power to involve the Congress in foreign policy, forcing them to either adopt his popular proposals are oppose them, which would be to their disadvantage because they were popular. He made offers that the Republicans could not refuse.
By the time the general election campaign rolled around, Truman was protected on the left by the Progressive Party and on the Right by Congressional Republicans who’d had to justify their votes on his legislation. By the time the campaign rolled around, the Republicans found it impossible to separate themselves from Harry Truman’s foreign policy.
Clearly, the Republicans in the 114th Congress have learned the lessons of 1948. Their recent moves – the Netanyahu invitation and the Iranian letter – are a way to position the Democratic Party as “soft on Islam.” They were calculated political acts in anticipation of the 2016 general election. It could work for them unless Obama uses his Zen Master skills. Obama has a year to introduce legislation that they will have no choice but to support. If he’s as smart as Harry Truman, he’ll find a way.