Harry Truman & George W. Bush

If Harry Truman is the template for rehabilitation of a President's image, I'd say George W. Bush will do just fine.

According to the WSJ survey of Presidential approval polls (the one I've been using a lot), Harry Truman matched Nixon for the lowest plunge in approval in the poll's history--outstripping W by nearly 10 percentage points. Similar to Truman, Bush's approval margin rebounded in the waning days of his Presidency to finish around 30%. Not great, but also far from an indicator of future historical review. That is to say, future historians and future generations may well look back on the shortsighted opinion polls of today and wonder why in the hell we so disliked an obviously successful President.

This is what has happened to Harry Truman.

I don't see a reason it can't or won't happen to George W. Bush.

[ed. note: BDS--Bush Derangement Syndrome--is one prominent reason.]

When Truman left office, his controversial war--Korea--was in a lot worse shape than George W. Bush's controversial war--Iraq.

Korea was on its way to what remains a permanent division between North & South. The North would go on to starve, kill, & re-educate millions of its people and be a nuclear obsessed pain in the posterior for American and the rest of the free world.

Contrast that with Iraq: A deposed dictator--by all accounts, the worse in the world at the time. Elimination of a aspirational nuclear/biological/chemical weapon threat. Establishment of a democratic ally/genuine friend to the U.S. in a historically contentious and unstable part of the world. The success of the surge and Bush's resistance to popular pressure to pull a Vietnam and leave Iraqis to certain genocide is another positive mark in Bush's column.

Given Truman's Korea precedent, how do you think President Bush is going to look upon further review?



Caveat emptor: The aforementioned BDS and outright hate of Bush demonstrated by the media (and leftist intellectuals) make even a future, unbiased examination of President Bush a very tall order. The fact that Truman was, of course, a Democrat, adds to the comparative difficulty.

But it also makes for an interesting, counterfactual consideration: If Bush had done all the things he had done, but were a Democrat, do you think we (collectively speaking) would have a similar view of him now?

Be honest.





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Thomas Sowell On 'Intellectualism'

This stuff is pure gold:

Among the many wonders to be expected from an Obama administration, if Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times is to be believed, is ending “the anti-intellectualism that has long been a strain in American life.”

He cited Adlai Stevenson, the suave and debonair governor of Illinois, who twice ran for president against Eisenhower in the 1950s, as an example of an intellectual in politics.

Intellectuals, according to Mr. Kristof, are people who are “interested in ideas and comfortable with complexity,” people who “read the classics.”

It is hard to know whether to laugh or cry.

Adlai Stevenson was certainly regarded as an intellectual by intellectuals in the 1950s. But, half a century later, facts paint a very different picture.

Historian Michael Beschloss, among others, has noted that Stevenson “could go quite happily for months or years without picking up a book.” But Stevenson had the airs of an intellectual — the form, rather than the substance.

What is more telling, form was enough to impress the intellectuals, not only then but even now, years after the facts have been revealed, though apparently not to Mr. Kristof.

That is one of many reasons why intellectuals are not taken as seriously by others as they take themselves.

As for reading the classics, President Harry Truman, whom no one thought of as an intellectual, was a voracious reader of heavyweight stuff like Thucydides and read Cicero in the original Latin. When Chief Justice Carl Vinson quoted in Latin, Truman was able to correct him.

Yet intellectuals tended to think of the unpretentious and plain-spoken Truman as little more than a country bumpkin.

Similarly, no one ever thought of President Calvin Coolidge as an intellectual. Yet Coolidge also read the classics in the White House. He read both Latin and Greek, and read Dante in the original Italian, since he spoke several languages. It was said that the taciturn Coolidge could be silent in five different languages.

The intellectual levels of politicians are just one of the many things that intellectuals have grossly misjudged for years on end.

During the 1930s, some of the leading intellectuals in America condemned our economic system and pointed to the centrally planned Soviet economy as a model — all this at a time when literally millions of people were starving to death in the Soviet Union, from a famine in a country with some of the richest farmland in Europe and historically a large exporter of food.

New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for telling the intelligentsia what they wanted to hear — that claims of starvation in the Ukraine were false.

After British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge reported from the Ukraine on the massive deaths from starvation there, he was ostracized after returning to England and unable to find a job.

More than half a century later, when the archives of the Soviet Union were finally opened up under Mikhail Gorbachev, it turned out that about six million people had died in that famine — about the same number as the people killed in Hitler’s Holocaust.

In the 1930s, it was the intellectuals who pooh-poohed the dangers from the rise of Hitler and urged Western disarmament.

It would be no feat to fill a big book with all the things on which intellectuals were grossly mistaken, just in the 20th century — far more so than ordinary people.

History fully vindicates the late William F. Buckley’s view that he would rather be ruled by people represented by the first 100 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard.

How have intellectuals managed to be so wrong, so often? By thinking that because they are knowledgeable — or even expert — within some narrow band out of the vast spectrum of human concerns, that makes them wise guides to the masses and to the rulers of the nation.

But the ignorance of Ph.D.s is still ignorance and high-IQ groupthink is still groupthink, which is the antithesis of real thinking.

(emphasis added)

Just remember: Conservatives are stupid and anti-intellectual and liberals are smart and debonair.


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State of the Union

We know our position isn't a popular one, but we'll miss President Bush when he's gone. You may not agree with his policies or politics, but you must agree that he is a man who does what he says he will do.

We haven't always agreed with his positions--immigration, Harriet Miers, early steel protectionism, signing McCain/Feingold--but we understand as well as anyone the difficulties he has faced.

Regarding Iraq, we only wish he had promoted General Petraeus sooner. The ongoing success of the surge and the future viability of Iraq will ultimately decide Bush's legacy and reputation among American presidents.

Ultimately, we must measure his performance against our highest order political priorities:

• the War on Terror (including Iraq)
• courts (Supreme Court nominees, etc.)
• taxes.

Despite the slow change of generals because of personal loyalty--remember, Lincoln was guilty of the same--Bush worked tirelessly and consistently to win the war and defend America from future attacks. It's important to note there have been no successful terror attacks against the US since 9/11. That's got to count for something.

During his second term, President Bush successfully nominated Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito. Roberts is a judicial minimalist and Alito is described as a justice similar to Scalia and Thomas. The important point is that they are not judicial activists, overturning laws and precedent based on their own or the latest popular morality or opinion. They understand that the role of the courts is not to legislate from the bench. With these two nominees, President Bush knocked the ball out of the park. Now if we could just get one more conservative justice.

On taxes, Bush has done very well. His tax cuts helped America recover from the "dot-com bubble" and the 9/11 attacks. The only failure was his inability to persuade Congress to make the tax cuts permanent. If a Democrat wins the Presidency, allowing those tax cuts to expire plus increasing taxes (as they have all proposed) would amount to the largest tax increase in history. And this is part of their plan to help the American economy.

Democrats, the MSM echo chamber have been bashing Bush for so long it's been considered a foregone conclusion that Bush will be remembered as one of the worst Presidents in history. Well, folks, history will have the final say. With any luck, it will be a fair review by a fair-minded academic historian.

Harry Truman, another of our heroes, received some of the lowest approval ratings on record. Opinion of Truman's presidency seems to rise every year. It helps that he was a Democratic president being reviewed by liberal academics, but we have faith in the historical discipline--faith that good historians will be able to get past their personal distaste for President Bush and tell the tale the evidence supports.

(At least, that's our idealized vision of history)


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