The Truman Show?

“Who could have imagined an idiot like Truman one day would be  considered a great president?” my father would ask with some exasperation as the 33rd president’s historical stock began rising a generation ago.

Dad, a staunch Republican, always treated HST with a measure of contempt. “The little bantam rooster,” was his pet name for the feisty Missourian.

I never quite saw it that way. There was, after all, a Lincolnesque quality associated with the man — a quality borne out in David McCullough’s superb biography of this 20^th century giant.

Truman, after all, was the quintessential self-made man, someone who had suffered one business failure after another, who despite being underestimated in every quarter, somehow managed to rise despite the odds. More than that, though, he was an intelligent man, more worldly that most people realized — someone who revered education and read voraciously, striving to fill in those intellectual gaps he missed in the course of his financially deprived youth.

Aside from that, he was the genuine commodity, someone who never took himself too seriously, who was perfectly at ease with himself and who never recoiled from the awesome burden associated with his office. Borrowing a description of a far less politically sensitive age, he was “a man’s man” in every sense of the word.

It’s precisely because of this respect for the 33^rd president that I recoil whenever I see comparisons drawn between him and the 43^rd president.  (Yes, I’m a Republican, but I think I know greatness when I see it — and,for that matter, when I don’t.)

I know the standard arguments: Bush has consistently defied expectations; he’s “grown” in office; he’s willing to make the tough decisions. In short his has been a vastly underestimated — or is that “misunderestimated” — presidency.

Frankly, I just don’t see it. There’s very little Trumanesque about the guy. I mean, we’re talking about a guy who never did much of anything until he sobered up and got religion 20 some years ago. Before that, his only claim to fame was as the alcoholic comic relief of the Bush and Walker clans.

He’s never displayed so much as one iota of intellectual curiosity that I know of, Ivy League credentials notwithstanding. Moreover, as Andrews Sullivan observed recently, he’s never made any attempt to learn on the job, to master the intricacies of 21^st century warfare, much as Lincoln did those of the 19^th and Truman those of the 20^th.

Introspective? A voracious reader? Hardly.

Trumanesque? No, unless you‘re referring to the Jim Carey character.

A National Party No More: The Conscience of a National Republican

There was a time when I would have greeted the sectionalization taking place within the GOP with unbridled glee. Now, all I can express is sadness.

If anything, it underscores the irony of politics. As a recent Economist article observes, former Georgia Governor and Sen. Zell Miller wrote a book only a few years ago bemoaning the sectionalization of his own Democratic party. Now, the tables seem to be turned. The GOP, historically the party of national unity, faces the bleak prospect not only of sectionalization but also of provincialism — a party confined only to one section, increasingly parochial, even obscurantist in its outlook.

As the Democrats reinvent themselves to look less like Harvard Yard and more like real America, the GOP looks less like real America, more like the campuses of Baylor or Bob Jones universities. And as the economist observes, there is a real danger here:

The danger for the Republicans is that they will respond to these Democratic advances by retreating to their heartland. The incoming Republican delegation will be more southern and more conservative than ever. It is hardly encouraging that the Senate Republicans have just reinstalled Mississippi’s Trent Lott as one of their leaders—a man who had to give up the top job in 2002 for making a racist remark. There are plenty of Republican activists who think that the future lies in becoming ever more conservative, and not worrying too much about the slow-growing north-east. That sort of thinking led the Democrats to become the Party of Taxachusetts and Michael Dukakis. The Republicans need a Zell Miller of their own.

Post-Pax Americana?

Most of us in the course of our lives are struck with moments of stunning insight and clarity.

 

Sometime at around age 15 or 16, I remember watching some low-budget Cold War-era flick about a communist takeover of the United States. Reflecting on it a few days later, I was struck by the rather stark realization that if the United States suffered some major calamity — an invasion or internal collapse of some sort resulting in the utter destruction of our ideals — there would be little left that was definably American.

 

Of course, way back then I had no idea that far less prosaic minds than mine had been ruminating on and debating this idea for years. We are, after all, a credal nation defined far more by our ideals than by the ancient ethnic or religious bonds that distinguish other nations from one another.

 

More recently, though, and at the risk of sounding like a neocon, it’s occurred to me that national greatness figures into this too.  From the beginning, we’ve either been a great nation in the making or a great nation in fact. And that raises an equally intriguing, if not unsettling, question: What would an America be like that ceased to be great or, at the very least, that lost much of its luster, one that was viewed less as a model and beacon to other nations and more as a spent historical force?  For that matter how would we Americans deal with it?  Would we follow our post-war British cousins, tying our fortunes to an ascending nation and striving to become its mentor?  Or would we nurse our frustrations in comparative isolation, much like post-Soviet Russia?

 

If New York Times columnist Paul Samuelson is right, we may be asking these sorts of questions sooner than many of us realize.  What Samuelson foresees is an America more akin to a post-World War I Britain — perhaps not so much a spent force like the Britain that emerged after Second World War but one that is aware of its limitations and less willing to impose its will across the planet.  As Samuelson writes,

 

America won’t retire from the world stage, but how active it will be is unclear.  Iraq has reduced national confidence and credibility. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid spending are already twice defense spending. Generational attitudes are shifting. A poll of 18- to 24-year-olds finds that 72 percent don’t think the United States should take the lead in solving global crises, reports Paul Starobin in National Journal.