"Honey, We Shrunk the President"

After months of a bigger-than-life presidency, Barack Obama is being cut down to size--by the enormity of an economic crisis, by orchestrated fear of Change as a reality rather than an idea and by exhaustion of the hope and idealism he stirred up during two years of campaigning. But behind the falling poll numbers and raucous town halls, something else may be going on.

"Health Debate Fails to Ignite Obama’s Web," says a New York Times headline for a report from Iowa: "As the health care debate intensifies, the president is turning to his grass-roots network--the 13 million members of Organizing for America--for support.

"Mr. Obama engendered such passion last year that his allies believed they were on the verge of creating a movement that could be mobilized again. But if a week’s worth of events are any measure here in Iowa, it may not be so easy to reignite the machine that overwhelmed Republicans a year ago."

Sensing a potential Obama Waterloo, the previously overwhelmed are suddenly energized. "The Obama White House has done the near impossible," Peggy Noonan claims. "It has united the Republican Party. Social conservatives, economic conservatives, libertarians—they're all against the health-care schemes as presented so far. They're shoulder-to-shoulder at the barricade again."

Maybe so, but there are also signs that Obama is morphing, not into Jimmy Carter as Noonan suggests, but more of an embattled Harry Truman who found his presidential voice by taking on a "good-for-nothing" Congress in 1948.

In his less combative way, Obama is now directly confronting the proprietors of America's failed " health care system that works better for the insurance industry than it does for the American people."

In today's weekly address, he says: "If you’re worried about rationed care, higher costs, denied coverage, or bureaucrats getting between you and your doctor, then you should know that’s what’s happening right now. In the past three years, over 12 million Americans were discriminated against by insurance companies due to a preexisting condition, or saw their coverage denied or dropped just when they got sick and needed it most.

"Americans whose jobs and health care are secure today just don’t know if they’ll be next to join the 14,000 who lose their health insurance every single day. And if we don’t act, average family premiums will keep rising to more than $22,000 within a decade."

In Montana yesterday, the President was confronted by an insurance salesman who asked him to explain why he was "vilifying" insurance companies. Obama told him and, in the coming weeks, will undoubtedly be telling Americans everywhere who the enemy is.

In what looks like the wreckage of his hopes for health care reform, Barack Obama, like John Paul Jones when asked to surrender, may be saying, "I have not yet begun to fight."

Voting and Waiting

The first time was 1948. I was 24 and had fought in a war, but the voting age was 21 then, and I cast my first ballot for Harry Truman, a centrist choice between Republican Thomas E. Dewey ("the little man on the wedding cake," Teddy Roosevelt's daughter Alice had dubbed him) and the liberal Henry Wallace, who had been Truman's vice president before being dumped from the ticket.

Clare Boothe Luce had pronounced Truman a "gone goose," but the man from Missouri ran a "Give 'em hell, Harry" campaign and won the White House after serving more than three years there in the wake of FDR's death in 1945.

All this ancient history comes back to mind today after my sixteenth vote for a president (more often for a loser than not, thanks to the Bushes) and recalls the range of emotions on Election Days for someone who believes politics really matters.

The two Eisenhower victories were days of resignation, even though I had been a volunteer speech writer for Adlai Stevenson in 1956. In the next decade, to my surprise, I learned to "like Ike" very much.

In the nail-biter between JFK and Nixon in 1960, I went to an afternoon movie to make the time pass but, even so, had to stay up all night to get the final result. It was worth it.

But in 1968, after working for Eugene McCarthy to try to end the war in Vietnam and being tear-gassed at the Democratic convention, I voted but refused to campaign for Hubert Humphrey and regretted my "purism" when Nixon won by less than one percent and went on to give us Watergate.

Since then, Election Days and Nights blur together except for 2000, and the less said and thought about that the better.

Today will be long and hard, but age has taught me to be patient, even in the face of an historic moment I never believed I would live to see. But, as in 1960, the waiting will be worth it.

McCain's Last Stand

As Barack Obama was promising voters "We're not going to let George Bush pass the torch to John McCain," the GOP candidate himself was in, of all places, Waterloo (Iowa), trying to persuade Tom Brokaw and himself that, on the 41st anniversary of being shot down in Vietnam, his campaign for president was not going down in flames now.

As Brokaw fired off poll numbers, quotes about Sarah Palin's shortcomings and McCain's own words about Bush that evoked the answer, "So do we share a common philosophy of the Republican Party? Of course," the old warrior resolutely insisted on his own version of reality, often using air quotes to denote sarcasm about those who say otherwise and consider Obama preferable.

In this hermetically sealed world, the polls are all wrong except for Zogby (which insists on using a model that forces equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats into an outdated mold) and voters will wake up on November 4th and elect the maverick McCain of 2000.

In this Rip Van Winkle universe, McCain on the economy is FDR in the Great Depression and Harry Truman upsetting Tom Dewey in 1948.

Listening to all this must have been an out-of-body experience for Brokaw, who ended the ordeal with valedictory-like "hope this has been a better Sunday than it was 41 years ago," to which McCain responded, "I appreciate your many years of informing the American people. You've come a long way from South Dakota, but you never forgot where you came from."

So today's Meet the Press ended with an exchange of good wishes by two elderly gentlemen, one of whom will ease back into retirement from TV next year and the other into being the titular head of a minority opposition party from his seat in the US Senate.

Obama as Eisenhower

On 60 Minutes last night, he evoked another man who came to office promising to end an unpopular war and to restore confidence after the tenure of a president with abysmal approval ratings.

"I am a practical person," Barack Obama said, channeling the Dwight Eisenhower of more than half a century ago. "One of the things I'm good at is getting people in a room with ...different ideas who sometimes violently disagree with each other and finding common ground, and a sense of common direction. And that's the kind of approach that I think prevents you from making some of the enormous mistakes that we've seen over the last eight years."

Looking back at his two terms in the 1950s, Ike had taken pride in bringing together the vehemently opinionated and reasoning them into agreement, as he had done in World War II with such military divas as Gen. George Patton and Britain's Viscount Bernard Law Montgomery.

"Extremes to the right and left of any political dispute are always wrong," Eisenhower would say. "The middle of the road is all of the usable surface. The extremes are in the gutters."

Despite his own mantra of change and Republican efforts to tar him as a wild-eyed radical, Obama is temperamentally akin to Eisenhower in his reliance on persuasion and conciliation. If elected, he will face a much more divided America, but his instinct will be like Ike's--to reason and heal.

Maybe it goes back to their common childhood roots in Kansas.

GOP Stages "Beauty and the Beast"

A Republican star was born tonight, but Sarah Palin's success as a pit bull with lipstick, to use her own definition of a soccer mom, was greatly enhanced by following the smug, sarcastic Rudy Giuliani, who redefined the word "demagogue" with his ugly, leering attacks on Barack Obama. (If you have a strong stomach, read it here, but I won't quote from it.)

America's Mayor, who led the polls for months before being unmasked as a self-seeking, corner-cutting profiteer after 9/11, set the stage for making the Republican VP candidate look poised and plausible in her well-crafted, well-delivered speech that did little more than exalt McCain and demean Obama with the clichés of a campaign desperately trying to avoid discussion of eight years of Bush disaster.

Introducing her parents, Palin went back more than half a century to a Democratic role model:

"Long ago, a young farmer and a haberdasher from Missouri followed an unlikely path to the vice presidency. And a writer observed, 'We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity,' and I know just the kind of people that writer had in mind when he praised Harry Truman."

Unanswered in Palin's speech were the multiple questions about her brief political history and the substance of her beliefs but, for one evening at least, she surpassed all expectations--thanks at least in part to being seen in contrast to the unspeakable Rudy Giuliani.

The Genius of George W. Bush

In an era of information and ideas moving at the speed of light, the rehabilitation has begun on both sides of the Atlantic.

Over here, David Brooks celebrates Bush's "stubbornness" and asserts that "when it comes to Iraq, Bush was at his worst when he was humbly deferring to the generals and at his best when he was arrogantly overruling them. During that period in 2006 and 2007, Bush stiffed the brass," took the advice of such strategic geniuses as Dick Cheney, John McCain and Lindsey Graham and, lo and behold, the Surge "has produced large, if tenuous, gains."

Before long, Brooks concludes that "the more honest among the surge opponents will concede that Bush, that supposed dolt, actually got one right." If playing nursemaid to a dysfunctional government, having American troops patrol Baghdad in rolling steel fortresses and spending billions of dollars with no end in sight is getting it right, Brooks may have a point about his "supposed dolt."

On the other side of the ocean, Andrew Roberts of the Telegraph sees Bush as a latter-day Harry Truman "who set the United States on the course that ended decades later in the defeat of Communism.

"If the West wins the modern counterpart of that struggle, the War Against Terror, historians will look back in amazement at the present unpopularity of George W Bush, and marvel at it quite as much as we now marvel at the 67 per cent disapproval rates for Truman throughout 1952."

If, as the saying goes, wishes were horses, we would all be riding in style and George W. Bush would be leading the parade. It's comforting that we may be "misunderestimating" him, but there will be plenty of time to think about that when he is out power and has stopped saving the world.

The Gender Agenda

"If many of Mrs. Clinton’s legions of female supporters believe she was undone even in part by gender discrimination," the New York Times asks today, "how eagerly will they embrace Senator Barack Obama, the man who beat her?"

The question underscores how crucial it is for Democrats to untangle the issue of what derailed America's first woman president from what seemed her clear path to the White House only a year ago. Was Hillary Clinton's campaign undone by the message or the messengers?

In the latter category, Sen. Clinton, although she bears ultimate responsibility, was clearly hampered not only by her husband but hot-shot strategist Mark Penn, who failed to see that voters would be turned off by a play-it-safe campaign fueled by what looked like a sense of entitlement. (They overlooked the lesson of what Harry Truman did to Thomas E. Dewey in 1948, a "sure" year for Republicans.)

"When people look at the arc of the campaign, it will be seen that being a woman, in the end, was not a detriment and if anything it was a help to her,” presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin points out. Her candidacy faltered as a result of “strategic, tactical things that have nothing to do with her being a woman.”

No matter how true that may be, and even if they accept its validity, that will bring cold comfort to millions of women who have so much hope invested in what Hillary Clinton calls breaking "the highest and hardest glass ceiling" in American life.

All other calculations aside, and there are many, this frustration has to be taken into account in Barack Obama's choice of a running mate. With consideration and without condescension, the potential first African-American President has to think long and hard about the symbolic and practical value of breaking through American prejudice with two for the price of one.

The Clintons' Taxing Schedule

Less than a year after he left the White House in 1953, Harry Truman gave a speech to the City College of New York alumni in a Manhattan hotel ballroom. I was editing their magazine at the time, and if the former president's "honorarium" had exceeded $1000 and expenses, the check would have bounced.

The memory comes back at the news in the Clinton tax returns that on one day in 2005 the former president made $475,000 for two speeches in Canada, more than double his annual salary in the White House, as part of a schedule of 352 speaking engagements that year.

The Clintons' total income of $109 million in the past eight years is a testament, pace the Obama bashers, to the value of words--from daises, in the pages of books and around corporate tables. It may be a measure of their embarrassment that the returns were released in a Friday night news dump to get as little attention as possible.

Cynics may see all this as selling out to 21st century celebrity, but we are a long way from the days after the Civil War when Gen. Robert E. Lee indignantly refused offers to write his memoirs. "I should be trading on the blood of my men," he said.

That evening in 1953, Harry Truman gave a rousing speech about the dangers of McCarthyism to academic freedom. It was worth every penny.

Margaret Truman Daniel

She was an only child in the White House, a Daddy's girl if there ever was one. Harry Truman doted on her and, when the Washington Post gave her singing concert a bad review, Truman fired off the most intemperate letter a President ever sent to a newspaper.

"I have never met you," Truman wrote to the critic, "but if I do you'll need a new nose and plenty of beefsteak and perhaps a supporter below."

Margaret Truman gave up singing, married a New York Times reporter, had four sons and starting writing books and magazine articles, some of them for me.

I first met her in 1953 when I was editing an alumni magazine. After leaving the White House, Truman came to the Waldorf to speak at our annual dinner. I elbowed my way into the crowd of photographers firing a dazzle of flash bulbs and strobe lights at him.

When they were herded out, I stayed behind with my 35mm camera with no flash for a few more exposures. Truman noticed the soft hiss-clicks of the shutter and walked up to me.

"How many pictures have you taken?" he asked.

I did a quick calculation--three rolls, 36 frames. "About a hundred."

His expression did not change. "I hope your camera breaks," he said and walked off.

Margaret, who overheard, touched my elbow and tried to console me. "He doesn't mean it. Flashbulbs hurt his eyes."

Years later, when she was writing for McCalls, Margaret Truman confided that as a kid she had always wanted an electric train set. I sent her one.

She died today in a week when Caroline Kennedy endorsed Barack Obama and Chelsea Clinton was on the campaign trail for her mother. First Families have changed since Margaret Truman's time, but she was a kind and caring woman whose books about the place, including murder mysteries, will be a lasting part of White House lore.

Two Kinds of Hillary Hubris

As New Hampshire prepares to vote, pundits are filing Clinton campaign death notices as confidently as they trumpeted her inevitability only weeks ago.

The coronation was premature, and the obituaries may be, too. The last time anyone looked, Matt Drudge was not empowered to pick convention delegates.

Observers detect a few tears and deride the woman who sheds them, forgetting that John Boehner, the House Republican leader, weeps buckets all the time.

Bill Clinton seems to lose his mojo with New Hampshire crowds for a day, and the New York Times finds a headline in it.

There is at least as much hubris in the herd journalism that is trampling the Clintons now as there was in their presumption that the Presidency was theirs by right of succession--and considerably more nastiness.

These observations come from a non-admirer of the Clinton campaign who suggested last summer that playing it safe could lead to a 21st century version of what Harry Truman did in 1948 to the poll-anointed sure bet, Gov. Thomas Dewey of New York, who squandered a big lead in the polls by taking voters for granted.

Hillary Clinton's hopes for the Presidency may indeed be thwarted, but it's not over until it's over, no matter what the often-wrong-but-never-in-doubt political pundits say.

History Lessons: Mitt, Huckabee and Hillary

This week, Presidential candidates who are trying to sell the future are involved with echoes from the past.

Mitt Romney's Texas speech, meant to invoke John F. Kennedy, drew on Nixon's Checkers speech as well, using his family to validate himself, insisting on his own virtue and pandering to his audience in a way JFK would have disdained.

His sermon is getting mixed reviews on the right--a Pat Buchanan rave and a John Podhoretz pan--but, like Nixon, Romney seems to have kept his candidacy from going down tubes.

Mitt's nemesis, Mike Huckabee, is getting the Dukakis treatment with accusations of being naïve in freeing a murderer-rapist to kill again. But the Republican preacher is a lot faster on his feet and smoother than the Democrats' 1988 candidate, and he has already started to convert his Willie Horton problem into a failure of "the system" rather than his own.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton is faced with reminders of the 1948 campaign, in which an over-confident Thomas E. Dewey, anointed by the public opinion polls, ran a cautious campaign and was overtaken by "Give 'em Hell, Harry" Truman.

As Truman himself said, "The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know."

Governing by Tantrum

"I veto, therefore I am" is the new theme of the Bush Administration.

In 1948, Harry Truman got to stay in the White House by railing against a Republican "do-nothing" Congress, and George W. Bush is now using the tactic in an effort to remain "relevant" as he prepares to leave the Oval Office.

"Congress has little to show for all the time that has gone by," he complained at his last press conference, a bizarre charge for a President who has vetoed Iraq appropriations bills, S-CHIP health insurance and this week is threatening to send back a water projects bill with enough bipartisan support to override his veto.

There is a kind of spoiled-rich-kid intransigence to the new Bush that is consistent with his behavior for six years when Republicans controlled both Houses and rubber-stamped whatever he wanted. Now, in the face of opposition, he is stamping his feet and threatening to hold his breath if he doesn't get his way.

"He may decide that all he wants to do is veto and stop progress," says Rep. Rahm Emanuel, head of the House Democratic Caucus. "But everybody will know who wants to change things, and who wants to keep them just the way they are."

But if Congressional Democrats are confident that voters will make that distinction next year, they should look closely at their approval ratings, which are lower than the President's.

To dramatize his claims about a do-nothing Congress, Harry Truman had called a special session on what was known as "Turnip Planting Day" in Missouri. His opponents obliged with inaction and made his point.

If today's Democrats want to avoid looking like turnips in '08, they had better start moving now.

Fred Thompson's Name Value

Political name recognition has gone Nutsy Fagin. This weekend the Washington Post has a disquisition on the power of the name “Fred.”

Anticipating the entry of Thompson into the Presidential race, an onomastician (scholar of the linguistics of names) tells us "The name Fred is basic and homey. It should give people a reassuring image."

Thompson augurs well, too, “a name with natural trochaic rhythm, which replicates a heartbeat and thus starts building appeal in the womb."

In 2004, we learn, there was a book titled "The Fred Factor" to extol the pleasures of hard work, and more promising still, further research reveals that “Fred” is derived from the German, meaning “Peace Ruler.”

In an earlier day, the candidate-to-be would have had to present his full appellation, Frederick Dalton Thompson. But Harry Truman started it all going downhill. Before him, Presidents had stately, sonorous names--Franklin, Herbert, Grover, Woodrow--but Truman was a not a Henry turned folksy, Harry was on his birth certificate.

After that, Dwight David Eisenhower was shortened to “Ike” by headline writers and the floodgates were open to Jimmy and Bill. Now every Tom, Dick or Harry can run for President, although two recent Georges have stemmed the tide temporarily.

Fred should do well against Hillary, which sounds like the name of the victim in an Agatha Christie mystery, but his chances against Barack, which means “blessed,” are etymologically uncertain.

Hillary's 1948 Wake-Up Call: Run Scared

The latest Presidential poll shows 63 percent of Americans think we will elect the first woman to be President next year. It’s time for Hillary Clinton to start worrying.

The stage could be set for a Republican to pull off what Harry Truman did in 1948 to the poll-anointed sure bet, Gov. Thomas Dewey of New York.

The parallels are there. With a big lead in the polls, Dewey ran an ultra-cautious campaign, making “The future lies ahead” speeches while awaiting coronation.

Truman took off on his “Give ‘em hell, Harry” whistle-stop tour, railing against a “do-nothing” Republican Congress and ended up the morning after election, grinning and holding up to the cameras a copy of the Chicago Tribune headlined, “Dewey Defeats Truman.”

Overconfidence can be a killer in American elections. Voters resent being taken for granted.

All this is brought up by the almost stately tone of the Clinton campaign thus far. It’s been gaffe-free, but will that be enough?

There is an outside chance that Obama may catch on with his new-generation appeal, but the greater danger for the former First Lady is appearing to be a too-cool Dewey (“the man on the wedding cake”) against a Republican underdog doing Harry Truman.

As an actor, Fred Thompson looks perfect for the part but any other nominee, including long-shot Mike Huckabee, could be prepped for the performance.

Sen. Clinton, while taking in the lessons of Truman, may also want to look at the campaign of the man from Arkansas who overcame the first George Bush with “the vision thing.” Give ‘em hell, Hillary.

Bush's Nose Dive Isn't Over

Today’s new approval rating shows President Bush at an all-time low, 26 percent.

This figure, Newsweek reports, “puts Bush lower than Jimmy Carter, who sunk to his nadir of 28 percent in a Gallup poll in June 1979. In fact, the only president in the last 35 years to score lower than Bush is Richard Nixon. Nixon’s approval rating tumbled to 23 percent in January 1974, seven months before his resignation over the botched Watergate break-in.”

But Newsweek did not go back far enough. In February 1952, Harry Truman's approval rating was at 22 percent. During the last three years of his second term, the figure never went above the low thirties.

Truman, like Bush, was presiding over an unpopular war, in Korea, and, like Bush, perhaps even more so, was suffering from a perception of corruption and cronyism in his White House.

But if Bush were to take comfort in the fact that Truman is now remembered with admiration and affection, he would be deluding himself.

Rock bottom for Bush is still to come. If he runs true to form and keeps his vow to stand firm about Iraq if only Laura and Barney are behind him, it could get much worse.

This fall, as Congressional Republicans in danger of losing their seats in ’08 start to bail out by backing benchmarks and timelines, even diehard backers will find it hard not to see him as isolated and stubborn.

In that case, approval ratings in the teens may be coming.