On the May 14th issue of Newsweek, the magazine placed on their cover the model for their preferred guy to take over the office in 2009. Immediately I recognized his smiling face as one of my personal favorites in the presidency. This man approached the many foreign and domestic crises of his presidency head on. He always formed part of the solution, even if we did not know about his role until much later. Being a strong willed "decider" won him few friends as time wore on, however. This man's determination to follow through with an unpopular war lost him what little personal popularity he ever enjoyed across the board. By the middle of his second term, approval ratings plummeted to near 20%. He held middle American values which earned him the disdain of intellectuals, which he happily returned.
Media elites saw his plain spoken manner as a sign of non intelligence, also often citing his business which failed in the midst of prosperity. Others mentioned the departure of his first secretary of state, a former general who held the public's admiration and respect, as proof that this president's foreign policy had gone wrong. At the end, members of his own party turned on him and compared him unfavorably to a predecessor with a charm, brilliance, vision, and ability to communicate almost unparalleled in American history. By the end of his second term, however, the economy was stronger than it was when he started and America's leadership in the free world was unquestioned.
No, Newsweek did not have a picture of George W. Bush on the cover. Instead we saw Harry Truman under the headline that asked who the next Truman would be. Since the Man From Missouri lies safely in his grave, liberal media types can safely trumpet him as their ultimate president. Truman rightly enjoys high praise from historians now despite his second term unpopularity. Few want to admit that our current president in many ways parallels Truman and deserves the same consideration for seeing the United States through a very difficult period.
The liberal media fails to acknowledge that George W. Bush follows in the foreign policy tradition of the confrontational Harry Truman. If you want to make them fall into a fetal position and tremble, mention Franklin D. Roosevelt's desire at the end of World War II for the United States to stamp out rogue regimes before they become powerful enough to threaten the peace of their regions, much less the US itself. He learned firsthand that we ought to destroy regimes like Hussein's and Hitler's earlier, lest we commit hundreds of thousands of soldiers and uncountable resources later.
Just because liberals today want to claim Harry Truman (and many of them actually did not in his time!) does not mean they have the right. Today's liberalism was not Truman's liberalism of confident American action. Today's Democratic Party is light years away from the one he led.
