Give’em hell Barry

 

“Obama as Truman: 'Give 'em hell, Barry'?

By Ed Hornick, CNN

September 9, 2011 10:16 a.m. EDT

Washington (CNN) -- In a passionate speech before a joint session of Congress, President Barack Obama issued a stern warning to Republicans: Compromise or I'll use it against you.

"You should pass it (his American Jobs Act economic plan). And I intend to take that message to every corner of this country," Obama said Thursday night.

Obama appears to have channeled Harry Truman, who went after what he called the Republican-controlled "do-nothing" 80th Congress in his 1948 presidential re-election campaign, traveling across the country by train, giving speeches to crowds in small towns and big cities.

Obama as Truman has emerged over the past couple of months.

On the flight from Washington to a Labor Day rally in Detroit, Democratic Sen. Carl Levin showed the president a speech Truman gave to union members in that same city on Labor Day 1948.

"And just to show that things haven't changed much, (Truman) talked about how Americans had voted in some folks into Congress who weren't very friendly to labor," Obama told the adoring crowd. "And he pointed out that some working folks and even some union members voted these folks in. And now they were learning their lesson."

John Gizzi, political editor for the conservative publication Human Events, writes that although Obama's Labor Day address was "devoid" of new policy items, he is following Truman's successful 1948 strategy in which the Missouri-born Democrat beat the decided favorite, Republican Thomas Dewey.

"Obama made it clear he was taking a page from Truman's '48 campaign handbook: He would run the kind of gloves-off, hard-punching campaign against Republicans in Congress that energized labor enough to help Truman win re-election as well as recapture control of Congress from the Republicans," Gizzi said.

The anti-do nothing strategy

The nation's 33rd president initially did not have a warm relationship with the Democratic base, which included powerful labor unions, Dixiecrats (Southerners who opposed Truman's pro-civil rights policies) and progressives.”