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"In 1946 under Harry Truman, Democrats lost 55 seats in the House—where Republicans grabbed a comfortable majority for the first time in sixteen years—and 13 seats in the Senate, giving Republicans there a 51-45 edge, their first majority in fourteen years.
The New Republic
How to Win When You’re Unpopular: What Obama Can Learn From Truman
August 15, 2011
By Norman Ornstein
From Wikipedia : Norman J. Ornstein is a political scientist and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative-leaning Washington D.C. think tank. Ornstein was born in 1948.
Ornstein studies American politics and is a frequent contributor to The Washington Post and many magazines. He has written a weekly column for Roll Call since 1993, and is currently co-director, along with Thomas Mann, of the AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project.
Ornstein helped draft key parts of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, also known as the McCain-Feingold Act.
Ornstein is a long-time friend of current U. S. Senator and former comedian Al Franken. Despite working at the conservative-leaning AEI, Ornstein considers himself a centrist.
Ornstein is a member of the Advisory Board of the Future of American Democracy Foundation, a non-profit, nonpartisan foundation in partnership with Yale University Press and the Yale Center for International and Area Studies "dedicated to research and education aimed at renewing and sustaining the historic vision of American democracy". He also serves on the Advisory Board of the Institute for Law and Politics at the University of Minnesota Law School. Ornstein is also a member of the Board of Directors of the nonpartisan election reform group Why Tuesday?.
Norman Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a weekly columnist at Roll Call.
How to Win When You’re Unpopular: What Obama Can Learn From Truman
Some excerpts :
But daunting as the campaign may seem, the President can at least take some solace in a precedent from 64 years ago: Harry Truman’s campaign for reelection in 1948—successful, despite a poor economic climate, and a polarized electorate—offers a promising path for Obama’s reelection. The question is whether he’s prepared to take it.
In terms of the difficulties they faced, these two Democratic presidencies have plenty of parallels. Most prominently, both were hampered by crippling midterm elections, fueled largely by anger about the poor state of the economy, which produced sweeping and across-the-board loss of seats for their party in Congress.
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The 80th Congress of 1947 and 1948 actually had some impressive achievements, acting with commendable bipartisanship on foreign affairs by enacting the Marshall Plan and a sweeping reorganization of the executive branch that included the establishment of the Defense Department and the National Security Council. But the Republicans’ record on domestic policy was something else entirely. As historian William Leuchtenburg put it, “they veered so sharply to the right that they alienated one segment of the electorate after another. They antagonized farmers by slashing funds for crop storage; irritated Westerners by cutting appropriations for reclamation projects; and, by failing to adopt civil rights legislation, squandered an opportunity to make further inroads among African-American voters.” At the same time, by pushing the anti-union Taft-Hartley legislation over Truman’s veto, they drove a labor movement furious with Truman back into the president’s arms.
In what will no doubt sound familiar to watchers of the current Congress, the sweeping GOP victories in 1946 convinced many Republicans that they had achieved a lasting ideological victory—that the American public had finished with the liberalism under FDR and Truman, and embraced their brand of conservatism. They were wrong. Voters had reacted to short-term economic conditions, and to a post-war mood for change, but not for a new right-wing ideology.
But it was Truman’s triumph to realize that the hyper-partisan Congress was as much a political boon as it was a political liability. Truman seized upon the conservative over-reaching and openly fought against what he dubbed the “Do-Nothing Eightieth Congress.” That rhetorical strategy paid dividends, as voters rebelled against the ideologues and the Democratic base was energized to elect a president they had long disparaged and opposed. Not only was Truman reelected—pulling off the upset of the century in a four-way race with a popular Republican nominee, Tom Dewey, and Democrats running to his left (former Vice President Henry Wallace) and right (states’ rights advocate Strom Thurmond)—but Democrats picked up nine seats in the Senate and a full 75 in the House to recapture both bodies. “The luckiest thing that ever happened to me,” Truman remarked years later, “was the Eightieth Congress.”
Barack Obama ought to be able to leverage his own recalcitrant Congress for political gain. The sitting 112th Congress, like Truman’s 80th, is dominated by a Republican House that believes that its sweeping victory reflected a huge public mandate to dismantle government as we know it.
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Obama must reckon with the fact that the 112th Congress will be an implacable political foil. If he does so, he’ll be able to profit from the Republicans’ ideological overreach. But a continued willingness to compromise without pushback will only encourage Republicans in Congress to increase their demands and push for more confrontation. The resulting turmoil will soon irredeemably sour independents against the entire government, including the president.
The alternative is not for the president to abandon negotiation or make his own set of non-negotiable demands, but to channel his inner Harry Truman. That means first redefining the terms of debate, framing a narrative across the country by both decrying the bickering and describing the consequences for voters everywhere if the Republican Congress has its way—what the budget cuts in the House budget would mean for medical research, how people with serious disabilities would be forced onto the streets, Medicaid patients unable to get organ transplants, and so on. The president’s domestic policy achievements from his first two years were not received enthusiastically by voters, and the record this year is dismal, but he can take a chapter from Truman’s playbook by describing in detail the many pressing issues facing the country, which the 112th House, and the Republican minority in the Senate, have refused to address.
Harry Truman’s 1948 campaign showed how much voters yearn for a strong and demanding leader and how powerful the presidential bully pulpit can be—not just in political terms, but by shaping the narrative, putting his pugnacious adversaries on the defensive, and mobilizing voters to demand a different approach to problem-solving. Rhetoric does not change the facts on the ground or in and of itself provide a new direction in policy. But the absence of an energized and angry president demanding better of the do-nothings in Congress can only lead to something worse.
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