Early on in his term, some conservatives were comparing George W. Bush to Ronald Reagan — saying that he had carried the Reagan Revolution that began replacing FDR’s New Deal mentality and orientation with conservative ideas several steps farther.
Bush, it was said, was far closer to Ronald Reagan than his country club Republican father, George Bush I.
But then came a host of issues, and some Barry Goldwater/Ronald Reagan conservatives began angrily breaking with George W. Bush, so you don’t hear that much anymore.
In fact, what followed were some analysts — some of them Republicans — comparing Bush to President Jimmy Carter, who until recently had seemingly become the quintessential poster boy for a bumbling President.
But now, Bush has his own idea of whom he resembles, and whose era this most resembles: he is like (he says) President Harry S. Truman:
President Bush implicitly compared himself to Harry S. Truman in a commencement address at the United States Military Academy on Saturday, saying Truman acted boldly against the “fanatic faith” of cold war communism in the same way Mr. Bush’s administration has responded to the threat of terrorism since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
“By the actions he took, the institutions he built, the alliances he forged and the doctrines he set down, President Truman laid the foundations for America’s victory in the cold war,” Mr. Bush told the class of 2006.
Mr. Bush has compared the struggle against communism to the current war against Islamic radicalism in previous speeches, but his address on Saturday was his most developed on the theme. He left it unsaid that Truman was deeply unpopular at the end of his two terms in office and that it took a generation to appreciate his achievements.
“Like the cold war, we are fighting the followers of a murderous ideology that despises freedom, questions all dissent, has territorial ambitions and pursues totalitarian aims,” Mr. Bush said. He added that “like Americans in Truman’s day, we are laying the foundations for victory.”
The president made a passing but pointed reference to the present standoff with Iran over its nuclear ambitions. “The message has spread from Damascus to Tehran that the future belongs to freedom, and we will not rest until the promise of liberty reaches every people in every nation,” Mr. Bush said.
The comparison of the two eras is not inappropriate. There are obviously huge differences between The Age of Terrorism and the Cold War, but most assuredly this battle will also be an extended one. The issue of nuclear weapons also looms in the background — although this time a strategy of mutual deterrence is not feasible.
But there is one key difference between George Bush and Harry Truman.
Truman believed “The Buck Stops Here” and had a sign that said so in his office. Yours truly remembers during the 60s when HST had his own filmed television show how the peppery old President was blunt-spoken and every word that came out of his mouth seemed like it came from his gut and his soul. Like him or not, what you saw was what you got — and every centimeter of his being seemed to scream that out to you.
With George W. Bush, the buck stops everywhere but at his desk.
It stops with Michael Brown, CIA officials who don’t agree with his policies, the mainstream news media, intelligence agencies that don’t give him all the information or connect the dots on pre-911 information, etc. He was supposed to be the business-school CEO model President, but if a CEO pleaded ignorance or delegated blame to the extent he did, that CEO would have been forced out by angry stockholders long ago.
And these days, except for his most lock-step supporters, many Americans in both political parties and — increasingly — those who don’t belong to any party feel they need to hire a lawyer to parse every word that comes out of his mouth. Was there a loophole in there somewhere? And then they need to hire body language experts to see if gestures or smiles off camera signal whether the words were from the heart or the product of an earlier rehearsal with Tony Snow.
Bush possesses Truman’s determination to take unpopular stands and stick with them, to take a risk on a bold policy. But he often passes the buck rather than accept that it’s his. And he has become to the image of sincerity what Haagen Daaz is to diet food.
President Bush: I studied Harry Truman. I watched Harry Truman. Harry Truman was a favorite President of mine.
You are no Harry Truman.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.