Thomas Frank: George W. Is No Martyr January 22, 2009 HNN

Thomas Frank: George W. Is No Martyr January 22, 2009 HNN
Source:WSJ(1-21-09)
Ordinarily we are able to limit the comparisons to Harry S. Truman to the campaign season. That's when, by annoying tradition, the presidential aspirantwho is down in the polls always finds that he bears a remarkable resemblance to the plainspoken Missouri Democrat who, famously, came from behind to winthe election of 1948.
But now we find that Truman has a second amazing historical quality: Not only is he the patron saint of floundering presidential campaigns, but he is thestar of hope for presidents leaving office at the nadir of their public approval ratings.
As you may recall, Truman was extremely unpopular when he finally left Washington in 1953, thanks largely to the Korean War. Today, however, he is thoughtto have been a solidly good president, a "Near Great" even, in the terminology of those surveys of historians they do every now and then.
And if Truman made that grand comeback, then so can George W. Bush. That's why the Truman comparisons continue, although campaign season is long over, withthe ever-dwindling supporters of Mr. Bush discovering significant similarities between their man and President 33. After all, both of them were in theWhite House at the beginning of big conflicts -- the Cold War, the war on terrorism -- that were not quickly resolved.
Let me be blunt. Let me be blunt like Harry Truman was blunt: Comparisons like this are nonsense. Not only do they depend on the hollowest, most superficialsort of resemblance, but they are easy to refute.
Faced with the Communist invasion of South Korea, for one thing, Truman did not make his stand against some uninvolved country, as Mr. Bush did with Iraqafter 9/11. What's more, Truman fought Joe McCarthy and the other demagogues of his day; McCarthy's spiritual descendants, meanwhile, made up part of Mr.Bush's base. But let us take the one thing Truman was known for before he became Franklin Roosevelt's vice president: rooting out waste and fraud in defensecontracting as World War II got under way.
Under the Bush administration, on the other hand, contracting waste was apparently so robust, so spectacular, that we might well think of it as an officialelement of administration policy: waste in New Orleans, waste in Iraq, waste in Homeland Security. And I say "apparently" because we will probably neverknow the extent of the problem. That quaint Trumanesque notion of accountability will almost certainly not be applied to the now departed Bush & Co.
The point of all the Truman comparisons, though, is not actually to compare anyone to Truman. It is to problematize the obvious verdict on the disastrousBush administration and clear the way for a more flattering counter narrative....
Posted on Thursday, January 22, 2009 at 7:58 PM