One of the most outrageous aspects of the recent Bush administration counter-offensive aimed at reversing the president’s bad poll ratings has been an effort to recast him as a brave, tough and far-sighted Commander-in-Chief in the tradition of Harry S. Truman (Condi Rice, in particular, has been promoting this wildly revisionist argument).Over at TPMCafe, G. John Ikenberry demolishes this false analogy in considerable detail, mainly in terms of Truman’s strategy for dealing with the post-World-War-II challenges facing America, which couldn’t be much farther from Bush’s strategy in the war on terror. Please read it all.I would, however, like to supplement Ikenberry’s analysis by pointing to the radically different leadership styles of Truman and Bush.Truman famously said of the presidency that “the buck stops here.” Bush’s aversion to admitting mistakes or taking accountability for his administration’s actions is so extreme and notorious that he actually gets praise for his occasional “mistakes were made” admissions, invariably abstract rather than specific, that perhaps he isn’t infallible.Truman quickly and decisively fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur as military commander in Korea, at a time when MacArthur was far more popular than the president himself. Bush cannot bring himself to fire Donald Rumsfeld, whose departure would not cause a ripple in public opinion, and would be quietly celebrated throughout most of the armed forces.Truman was of course a fiery partisan, but he also cooperated with Republicans whenever possible, especially in foreign policy. Bush pretends to be “above party,” while in practice (with the sole exception of the No Child Left Behind legislation) treating Democrats who don’t simply surrender to him as nonentities to be ignored if not destroyed.I would have to guess that this campaign to make Bush “the new Truman” is based on the superficial identification of the two presidents as simple, resolute and non-reflective men who never worried much about criticism.Truman, of course, was a man from a very humble background, who did not attend college. Yet his administration built virtually the entire complex superstructure of multilateral organizations and policies, economic as well as diplomatic and military, that guided the West throughout the Cold War and beyond.Bush, the ultimate child of privilege, with a presidential father, a prep school education, and degrees from two Ivy League universities, has actively cultivated a non-reflexive attitude, and is “visionary” only in the imagination of his speechwriters.I obviously don’t expect the Bushies to advertise their boss as the reincarnation of some more likely figure such as Warren G. Harding, but still, this Truman Show does not pass the laugh or smell tests.
TDS Strategy Memos
Latest Research from:
Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
-
January 8: No, Jimmy Carter’s Panama Canal Treaty Didn’t Make Ronald Reagan President
I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn that Donald Trump’s grip on political history is slippery at best. But at New York I went to the trouble of demolishing his claim that the Panama Canal Treaty cost Jimmy Carter the presidency:
In his rambling press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday, Donald Trump said some very curious things, to put it mildly. One claim about Jimmy Carter is just wrong. Following up on his recent threats to retake control of the Panama Canal if Panama doesn’t lower shipping fees and eliminate any Chinese involvement in managing the passageway, the president-elect twice asserted that Carter lost his reelection bid in 1980 primarily due to his sponsorship of the treaty that returned the canal to Panama.
I have no idea where Trump got this idea, but it makes little sense. The Panama Canal Treaty, initially negotiated by Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, was signed and ushered through the Senate by Carter in April 1978. It was ratified by a 68 to 32 margin, with Republican Senate leader Howard Baker playing a key role (conservative icon William F. Buckley was another key backer of the treaty). Yes, the treaty was initially unpopular, but it became less so after its ratification. And while Ronald Reagan opposed the treaty, and made it a campaign issue against incumbent Republican Ford during the 1978 GOP primaries, it wasn’t a big deal at all by 1980, as Ron Elving recently observed at NPR:
“Reagan remained opposed to the Panama deal but ‘noticeably muted his rhetoric in 1977 when the treaties were finally signed by President Jimmy Carter,’ according to Lou Cannon, the reporter and biographer who covered Reagan more closely and for longer than anyone. In President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, Cannon reports that ‘Reagan’s interest in the Panama Canal declined after the issue had served its political purpose.’ Cannon has written that Reagan’s pollster told him the issue was primarily of interest to hard-core conservatives. By 1980, Reagan had that category locked up.”
If the treaty had been calamitous for Carter, you’d think he would have paid a big price during the 1978 midterm elections that immediately followed the Senate debate on the subject, but in fact, Republican gains in those midterms were modest, despite a lot of other issues bedeviling Democrats, along with a historic realignment that was already underway in Carter’s home region. Indeed, contra Trump’s assumption that foreign policy cost Carter the White House in 1980, there were plenty of more prominent reasons for the outcome aside from the much-discussed and deeply embarrassing hostage crisis. The economy was in terrible shape in 1980, with an unemployment rate of 7.1 percent, an average inflation rate of 12.67 percent, and average home-mortgage rates of 13.74 percent. That alone almost certainly doomed Carter’s reelection. But aside from that, he had to weather a tough primary challenge from Ted Kennedy; a third-party candidacy from ex-Republican John Anderson that wound up taking away more votes from the incumbent than from the challenger; and an inevitable loss of support in southern-inflected parts of the country following his precedent-breaking win in 1976.
Subsequently Reagan did nothing to unravel the Panama Canal Treaty, and by the time the canal was fully turned over to Panama at the end of 1999 (with Carter present), it was a largely noncontroversial event.
For his own mysterious reasons, Trump clearly wants to inflate the significance in American politics of the Panama Canal issue, past and present. Unfortunately, the main participants in the debate over the Canal Treaty aren’t around to dispute his claims. It’s a shame that Trump has chosen to cast a shadow on Carter’s state funeral later this week by mischaracterizing one of his key accomplishments as a career-ending disaster.