America Needs Another Ike

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"Censorship, in my opinion, is a stupid and shallow way of approaching the solution to any problem. Though sometimes necessary, as witness a professional and technical secret that may have a bearing upon the welfare and very safety of this country, we should be very careful in the way we apply it, because in censorship always lurks the very great danger of working to the disadvantage of the American nation."

Dwight D. Eisenhower
April 24, 1950

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As a student of history, I tend to believe that Dwight Eisenhower could not have been elected president in the modern incarnation of a world that was only beginning to develop when he served as America's commander–in–chief.

Presidents tend to be products of their times, not the other way around. Even if they enter the presidency with a specific agenda, circumstances often force them to change direction in ways they never anticipated. Presidents aren't prophets, and few probably would have chosen the crises they had to face.

But they are also influenced by the technology that exists when they live and serve. Some presidents have been slower than others to embrace emerging technology, and some have been ill–equipped to do so. Most presidents have been the first presidents to do something, but history always remembers things like:

• the first president to be photographed (John Quincy Adams — although he wasn't president when the photograph was taken);
• the first president to ride in a train (Andrew Jackson);
• the first president to have a telephone installed in the White House (Rutherford B. Hayes);
• the first president to ride in a submarine and an airplane (Theodore Roosevelt in both instances);
• the first president to own an automobile (William Howard Taft);
• the first president to give a radio broadcast from the White House (Calvin Coolidge), and
• the first president to appear on television (Franklin D. Roosevelt).

In a more recent presidential first, Bill Clinton was the first president to send an email, but apparently — and contrary to what his wife has said — he hasn't made any use of email in his post–presidential years.

Eisenhower, who was born 125 years ago next Wednesday, was the last president born in the 19th century. He was not far removed from his heroic military leadership in World War II, an experience that clearly shaped his view of the world, and he benefited from the public's good will because of it. But America was only beginning to see emerging technological advances, often made possible by war–related research and development, that would come to play important roles in American politics in the not–so–distant future.

In Ike's day, for example, it wasn't crucial to look good on television because TV wasn't yet a commonplace item in every home. By the time Ike's vice president, Richard Nixon, was elected president, there were a lot more TVs in American homes, and how a candidate came across on television was more important. Today it is impossible to imagine a candidate who does not give a good impression on television being much of a success.

In many ways, that is reflected by a growing tendency to favor candidates because of which demographic group(s) they are believed to bring to the electoral table. The face of America is its president, and Americans increasingly show an inclination for that face to be a particular color or gender — and, in equal and opposite proportions, disdain for what Martin Luther King Jr. would call the content of a person's character.

Ike wasn't very photogenic, when you get right down to it. And he wasn't a stemwinder of a speaker, either. But he had some core virtues. Modern politicians would do well to follow his lead. The country certainly would benefit.

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He said things that made a lot of sense, things that both Democrats and Republicans ought to study today, but he showed no penchant for what is known today as a "sound bite." He probably thought they were frivolous and overly simple, but such things win elections these days. Common sense often cannot be boiled down to a single phrase that is suitable for a bumper sticker — although "I Like Ike" wasn't bad for its day.

Ike might have been persuaded to run as a Democrat. He had no party affiliation and was pursued by officials from both parties to seek their nominations. It is interesting that House Speaker Sam Rayburn brushed off talk about Eisenhower seeking the presidency when the topic was first raised in 1948: "Good man," Rayburn said, "but wrong business."

Eisenhower decided not to seek the presidency in 1948, and many people thought he had passed up his only opportunity. It was widely assumed at that time that Tom Dewey, who had lost the 1944 election to Franklin D. Roosevelt, would be elected over Roosevelt's successor, Harry Truman. It was further assumed that Dewey would be re–elected in 1952 — and Eisenhower, at age 66, would be too old to seek the presidency by 1956.

But Truman won in what is still regarded as a major upset, then became phenomenally unpopular and chose not to seek another term in 1952. By that time, Eisenhower was ready to declare himself a Republican after voicing his disagreements with Democrat policies. He may have been just as motivated by a desire to prevent Sen. Robert Taft, a non–interventionist, from winning the Republican nomination.

Eisenhower did deny Taft the nomination — after one of the closest, most bitterly fought presidential nomination battles in American history — but I have always wondered if it had as much (if not more) to do with Taft's unpopular opposition to the postwar Nuremberg trials. (In the interest of fairness, I should point out that future President John F. Kennedy praised Taft in "Profiles in Courage" for taking a principled stand in spite of public opposition.)

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During his tenure, Ike balanced the budget three times and cut the federal debt as a share of GDP. He was criticized as a "do–nothing" president, probably because of his domestic record, particularly Ike's record on civil rights. Seen from the 21st century, Ike's record on promoting racial equality appears to be unimpressive, but he took some important steps. Truman gets credit, and rightfully so, for desegregating the military, but Ike took it farther, ending the segregation that existed in VA hospitals and schools on military installations. His administration also navigated legislative waters in 1957 to pass the first civil rights act since Reconstruction.

Having grown up in Arkansas, one of the first things I learned about Eisenhower was that he enforced a desegregation court order that had been defied by Orval Faubus, the governor of Arkansas. It's worth noting that one of the members of Congress who opposed the president's action was Democrat John F. Kennedy.

I studied this when I took Arkansas history in school; in those days, I think it was a class everyone took in the fifth grade. For me that would have been more than a decade after the Little Rock Central crisis, but my memory is that our textbooks were brand–spanking new, so new that the books squeaked when you opened a cover or turned a page. Ours was the first class in my hometown to study an unbiased account of that moment in our home state's history. Those books had not been in use the previous year, when a text that was less balanced and tended to favor Faubus was used.

The New Republic's Richard Strout, bewildered by Eisenhower's soaring popularity (which seldom strayed below 50%), complained that "the less he does the more they love him." He didn't understand, as Ike did, that the American public was weary from the back–to–back experiences of the Great Depression and World War II. In the '50s, Americans craved stability.

Black Americans were still inclined to heavily support Democrats, as they had been since the ascent of Franklin D. Roosevelt to the presidency in 1932, but in 1956 Eisenhower received 39% of black America's vote when he sought a second term. Within a decade, Republican presidential nominees were receiving much less than 10% of black votes. Win or lose, has any Republican presidential nominee even come close to matching Eisenhower's achievement in the last 60 years?

In his rather modest, soft–spoken Midwestern way, Eisenhower achieved things without feeling the need to resort to self–promotion. He respected constitutional limits — on the use of military power, of the capacity of the government and the role of the president — and worked within them. He didn't try to get around them.

But there were still times when he wanted credit for things he did.

"The United States never lost a soldier or a foot of ground in my administration," he said after leaving the White House. "We kept the peace. People ask how it happened — by God, it didn't just happen, I'll tell you that."

We could use another Eisenhower today. Unfortunately, no candidate in either party remotely resembles him.

The Fine Art of Compromise ... and Lost Opportunity

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"The trusts and combinations — the communism of pelf — whose machinations have prevented us from reaching the success we deserve should not be forgotten nor forgiven."

Letter from Grover Cleveland to Rep. Thomas C. Catchings (D–Miss.)
August 27, 1894

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I have mentioned here that I have been studying the presidency most of my life.

And Grover Cleveland has always fascinated me. He always stood out because he was — and still is — the only president to serve two nonconsecutive terms. (He was also president half a century before presidents were limited to two terms — so, presumably, he could have sought a third term in 1896, but his party repudiated him. More on that in a minute.)

I have found it fascinating, too, to observe all the different presidents in American history to whom Barack Obama has been compared.

That didn't really begin with Obama. Incoming presidents are almost always compared to presidents from the past. I don't know why. Maybe to try to get an idea of what to expect. There have been no other black presidents so Obama couldn't be compared to anyone on a racial level.

When he was about to take the oath of office for the first time, Obama was compared, at different times and for different reasons, to great presidents from American history like Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Lincoln, of course, was a natural, having presided over the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation. There were some comparisons, as well, to Franklin D. Roosevelt, mostly because FDR had taken office during the most perilous economic period in the nation's history, even to John F. Kennedy, perhaps because both were young and their elections made history.

Over the course of his presidency, Obama has been compared to less accomplished presidents. In recent years, it has frequently been asked if he is more incompetent than Jimmy Carter, who is generally regarded as the most incompetent president in recent memory.

Six years ago, about three weeks before Obama took the oath of office the first time, political scientist Michael Barone suggested that Dwight Eisenhower might be the more appropriate comparison, and I wrote about that.

Barone's point was that Eisenhower had done little to help his fellow Republicans, many of whom "grumbled that Ike ... was selfish.

"Eisenhower, I suspect, regarded himself as a unique national figure," Barone wrote, "and believed that maximizing his popularity far beyond his party's was in the national interest."

I was reminded of that tonight when I heard Obama's speech on immigration. Many congressional Democrats are supporting the president — publicly, at least — but some are not. Regardless of the negative ramifications of his executive order — and a poll conducted Wednesday night indicates that nearly half of respondents oppose Obama's acting via executive order — Obama seems determined to prove that he is still relevant.

Coming a mere two weeks after Democrats lost control of the U.S. Senate in the midterm elections, it seems to me a president who was more concerned about his party's future than his own would act more prudently. Bill Clinton, after all, lost control of both chambers of Congress in the midterms of 1994, and Democrats didn't regain the majority in either chamber for 12 years.

Clinton did manage to retake some his party's lost ground when he ran for re–election in 1996 and then again after surviving an attempt by the Republicans to impeach him before the 1998 midterms, defying all logic.

I've always felt that a lot of that was because Clinton was appropriately chastened by his party's massive losses in the midterms. I felt, at the time, that many of the voters who had voted Republican in 1994 believed Clinton had learned an important lesson and were more open to supporting him and the members of his party in 1996.

Obama has now been through two disastrous midterm elections, and he has emerged from the second not chastened but defiant. He appears to be entirely ready to do everything on his own, completely ignoring the role that the Founding Fathers intended for Congress to play. An opportunity to let compromise and cooperation be what the Founding Fathers envisioned in their fledgling republic is being squandered.

Once such an opportunity is lost, once such a president takes this kind of approach, it is hard, if not impossible, to establish a rapport with the other side.

Obama isn't the first to do this, which brings me back to Grover Cleveland. A little background information is called for here.

Cleveland was first elected president in 1884. He was the first Democrat elected to the office in more than a quarter of a century — in spite of the revelation that Cleveland had fathered a child out of wedlock. It was close, but Cleveland managed to pull it off.

Four years later, when Cleveland sought a second term, conditions were good. The nation was at peace, and the economy was doing pretty well, but there was division over the issue of tariff policy. The election was another cliffhanger. Cleveland again won the popular vote by a narrow margin, but his opponent, Benjamin Harrison, received enough electoral votes to win.

So Cleveland left the White House in March 1889, but he returned as the Democratic nominee in 1892 and defeated Harrison. It was the second time a major party nominated someone for president three straight times. The first one, Andrew Jackson, also won the popular vote all three times; like Cleveland, though, he was denied the presidency once because he lost the electoral vote.

Perhaps it was the experience of having been returned to the White House after losing the electoral vote four years earlier that contributed to Cleveland's messianic complex. To be fair, it would be hard not to feel that there was an element of historical inevitability at work.

But that doesn't really excuse how Cleveland approached the outcome of the 1894 midterms.

One cannot tell the story of the 1894 midterms without telling the story of the Panic of 1893 for it defined Cleveland's second term as well as the midterms. It was the worst economic depression the United States had experienced up to that time. Unemployment in America was about 3% when Cleveland was elected in 1892. After a series of bank failures, it ballooned into double figures in 1893 and stayed there for the remainder of Cleveland's term.

The depression was a key factor in the debate over bimetallism in 1894. Cleveland and his wing of the Democratic Party were known as "bourbon Democrats," supporters of a kind of laissez–faire capitalism. They supported the gold standard and opposed bimetallism, in which both gold and silver are legal tender.

The economy was already the main topic of the campaign, and a major coal strike in the spring didn't help. In fact, it hammered the fragile economies of the states in the Midwest and the Northeast. Republicans blamed Democrats for the poor economy, and the argument found a receptive audience.

Republicans gained House seats just about everywhere except the Southern states, which remained solidly Democratic, and states where Republicans already held all the House seats. Democrats went from a 220–106 advantage to a 104–226 deficit. It remains the most massive shift in House party division in U.S. history.

Under circumstances such as these, a president has two choices — he can be conciliatory and try to move to the political center, as Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan did, or he can dig in his heels and be even more intransigent.

Much as Obama is doing 120 years later, Cleveland chose the latter approach after the midterms in 1894. Perhaps he felt he had no allies in Washington anymore, but I've always felt his go–it–alone approach was a big reason why he was repudiated by the Democrats in 1896. The fragmented party chose instead to go with William Jennings Bryan, who would be nominated three times and lose each time. In fact, with the exception of the Woodrow Wilson presidency, no Democrat would win the White House for the next 36 years.

For that matter, they didn't regain the majority in the House until the 1910 midterms, but they lost that majority six years later in spite of the fact that President Wilson was at the top of the ballot. It took the stock market crash of 1929 to restore Democrats to majority status in the House in the midterms of 1930.

That is one cautionary tale that emerges from this year's midterms. Another is the exaggerated importance given to the turnout. I know it is a popular excuse to use after a party has been slammed in the midterms, but it is misleading.

In 2006, when Democrats retook the majority in both chambers for the first time in 12 years, they treated it as a mandate for change. But roughly the same number of voters participated in 2006 as participated in 2014. Granted, there has been an increase in the overall population in those eight years so the share of registered voters who participated is different, but the overall numbers are the same.

Republicans, too, pointed to low turnout in 2006. My advice to them would be not to duplicate the Democrats' mistake. They believed their success was permanent — and it never is in politics.

It can last longer, though, if you lead.

Nixon's Appeal to the Great Silent Majority

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"So tonight, to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans, I ask for your support. I pledged in my campaign for the presidency to end the war in a way that we could win the peace. I have initiated a plan of action which will enable me to keep that pledge. The more support I can have from the American people, the sooner that pledge can be redeemed. For the more divided we are at home, the less likely the enemy is to negotiate at Paris."

Richard Nixon
Nov. 3, 1969

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If it hadn't been for the speeches and statements he made during the Watergate scandal, the speech that Richard Nixon gave 45 years ago tonight might have been remembered as his most significant presidential address.

The American people were divided over the war in Vietnam, a division that came to be perceived along all sorts of other (mostly irrelevant) lines — by race, by age, by gender, by region, by economic status — that weren't entirely irrelevant.

On this night in 1969, Richard Nixon introduced the concept of the mythical "great silent majority" into the American dialogue — suggesting that, in spite of themselves, most middle class Americans agreed with each other but were too polite to say so, and implying that he was one of them — a true–blue patriotic American who had remained silent too long. He contrasted his strategy of political realism with the vocal minority and its unrealistic idealism.

He tried to strike a somewhat defiant note. "If I conclude that increased enemy action jeopardizes our remaining forces in Vietnam," Nixon declared, "I shall not hesitate to take strong and effective measures to deal with that situation." He assured his listeners that was not a threat but a promise.

Nixon appealed for their support — and urged them (again by implication) not to participate in demonstrations against the war or to side with the counterculture — on this night 45 years ago. He had been elected president a year earlier by an extremely narrow margin, and he wanted to build a consensus.

He did better than that, at least initially. Before the speech, Gallup reported that his approval rating was 56%; after the speech, his approval was up 11 points to 67%, nearly the highest of his presidency.

And, in reality, it may well have laid the foundation for his 49–state landslide re–election in 1972.

In many ways, though, I have believed that the speech was a logical extension of the "Southern strategy" Nixon used to win the 1968 presidential campaign. At that time, Democrats still dominated Southern politics, but by using subtle and not–so–subtle appeals to racism, Republicans began chipping away at the Democrats' grip on politics in the South.

The most immediate effect was to siphon off votes upon which the Democrats' presidential nominee could always depend in the past — with the most direct recipient being independent candidate George Wallace. The Republicans hoped to pick off a few Southern states with Wallace and Hubert Humphrey dividing a vote that almost certainly would have defeated Nixon if it had remained united. At least, that is how Nixon saw it.

Nixon learned that divide and conquer works. Wallace still won nearly half a dozen Southern states, but Nixon managed to carry Florida, Virginia, Tennessee and the Carolinas — and, in so doing, won the election. But the Southern strategy was regionally confining. "Silent majority" transcended regional boundaries.

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After his speech 45 years ago tonight, Nixon used appeals to patriotism to define Republicans — and to divide groups of Americans — having already begun a process that would fulfill Lyndon Johnson's prophecy that his advocacy of civil rights legislation had handed the South to the Republicans for a generation.

In hindsight, I would say the ongoing shift from Democrat to Republican in the South truly began in that 1968 election. What other conclusion can one draw? The Democrats swept the nation and many Southern states in 1964, when Johnson faced Barry Goldwater. But, in the 1964 election results, there were clues to be found, hints about the direction the South was traveling.

It happened quietly and gradually. It certainly was not achieved overnight. But little by little, one by one, Southern states voted for Republicans on the federal level, then they began to do it on the state and local levels as well. And, one by one, Republicans picked off each state.

Tomorrow, it is quite likely that my home state of Arkansas will be the last Southern domino to completely fall when Sen. Mark Pryor appears poised to lose his bid for a third term — perhaps the last time that Nixon's political legacy will be felt in America.

The Southern strategy has seen some backsliding in recent elections, though, with Virginia and North Carolina voting for a Democrat for president for the first time in decades and Florida voting Democratic as well — and Democrats representing states like Louisiana and North Carolina in the Senate — but much of that can be attributed to the arrivals of Democrats whose jobs have brought them there from Northern and coastal cities. So the Southern strategy may be around for a few more elections. There may still be some work to be done in some place.

But, by and large, that transition is nearly complete now.

That shift in party preference may have been the most remarkable domestic political development I have witnessed in my lifetime — the transformation of an entire region, the South, from reliably Democrat to reliably Republican. I grew up in the South; it simply went without saying that just about everyone there was a Democrat, and political squabbles came down to the liberal, conservative and moderate wings of the party. Winning the primary in the spring or early summer was tantamount to election; beating the Republican in November was a formality.

Some people would say that Republicans have always been right–wingers, but the truth is that there really was no rightward shift in Republican ideology, in the South or elsewhere, until 1980, when the Reagan campaign and the emergence of the Moral Majority combined to coax conservative Christians into politics. There were pockets of Republican support throughout the South before then. Up until that time, I saw no real political involvement on the part of the churches — but I sure saw it after that.

Nearly all of the Republicans who were nominated in the decades before Reagan — including both Nixon himself and the man Nixon served as vice president, Dwight Eisenhower — are increasingly viewed as too moderate for the modern Republican Party.

It was only after Reagan won the nomination that the momentum for Republicans in the South really became noticeable.

All that was still many years away when Nixon spoke to the "great silent majority" 45 years ago tonight. Nixon drew the lines in the dirt that night.

"Let historians not record that, when America was the most powerful nation in the world, we passed on the other side of the road and allowed the last hopes for peace and freedom of millions of people to be suffocated by the forces of totalitarianism," Nixon said.

Something to think about when you watch the election returns tomorrow night.

LBJ's Daisy Commercial Changed Everything

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Less than a year ago, I wrote that Lee Atwater deserved much of the credit for our present state of polarization, thanks to the way he ran George H.W. Bush's national campaign 26 years ago.

But I guess credit for the template for divisive modern political advertising goes to Lyndon Johnson and his 1964 campaign staff. They were responsible for a commercial that is remembered as the "daisy commercial." It had its one and only airing 50 years ago today.

It showed a little girl plucking the petals from a flower, as small children do, and counting. The girl who was shown in the commercial was 2 years old, and she was observed in a very serene, pastoral setting.

As she counted to 10 — haltingly and, at times, out of sequence, which is understandable with a child that age — an adult voice began a missile launch countdown in the background, and the camera zoomed in on the girl's face until the pupil of her eye filled the screen.

That was followed by a mushroom cloud — and a snippet from one of Lyndon Johnson's speeches.

"These are the stakes," Johnson said. "To make a world in which all of God's children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die."

"Fifty years later, the visual is startling — even shocking," writes John Rash for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. "But just as jarring are the words."

Another voice — I've heard it was sportscaster Chris Schenkel's (but I heard Schenkel call football games when I was growing up, and the voice in the commercial never sounded like his voice to me) — then said, "Vote for President Johnson on Nov. 3. The stakes are too high for you to stay home."

The message was clear. Johnson's opponent, Barry Goldwater, could not be trusted with nuclear weapons.

"You can love 'Daisy' for its power or hate it for its excess — I both love it and hate it — but it changed political advertising forever," wrote Drew Babb in the Washington Post.

It cannot be denied that the daisy commercial was an effective reminder that Goldwater had voted against the nuclear test ban treaty.

Babb, who teaches political advertising at American University and is president of the firm Drew Babb & Associates, went on to list the ways it changed political advertising. The logic is hard to fault.

• "It gave politicians a license to kill."
  
  Babb observed that "[e]arlier political commercials were overwhelmingly upbeat." He pointed out that, only four years earlier, an advertisement for John F. Kennedy featured Frank Sinatra singing a revised version of "High Hopes."
  
  Dwight Eisenhower's commercials were relentlessly upbeat.

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  Of course, television was still in its infancy then. As it grew up, it grew teeth. Fangs, in fact.
• "By all means, trash the tropes."
  
  The rules were clearly different. Johnson's ad agency was largely made up of "New York street brawlers" accustomed to competing over products, not politics, and they did what they knew.
• "Overreacting can boomerang."
  
  That is a fact that both parties should keep in mind today. Advertising has become much more sophisticated in half a century, but the experience of 1964 should not be forgotten. Republicans howled about the ad, and Johnson's campaign pulled it after its only showing 50 years ago today. But the networks reported on the Republican reaction and, so the viewers would know what the fuss was about, ran the ad over and over again.
  
  If they hadn't seen it when it aired as a commercial, they were bound to have seen it when it was shown repeatedly on the nightly news. Consequently, the message was reinforced — and almost certainly contributed to Johnson's landslide victory that fall.

Do you think the theme is outdated because America is the world's only remaining superpower? A group called Secure America doesn't. It recently unveiled a commercial called "Daisy 2," and it was clearly inspired by the commercial that ran 50 years ago.

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It pulls no punches. Here is what the narrator says:

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"These are the stakes. We either stand up to supporters of terrorism, or we and our allies risk losing the freedom we cherish. We must not let the jihadist government of Iran get a nuclear bomb. President Obama has an opportunity to stop it. But he is failing. Join with us. Let's secure America — now."

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D-Day: The Beginning of the End

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"Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force!

"You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty–loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers–in–arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.

"Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle hardened. He will fight savagely.

"But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940–41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man–to–man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men.

"The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!

"I have full confidence in your courage and devotion to duty and skill in battle.

"We will accept nothing less than full Victory! Good luck! And let us beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking."

Dwight Eisenhower's Order of the Day, June 2, 1944

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I thought about writing about those who gave their lives in service to this country last week on Memorial Day — but my thoughts of late have been on today's 70th anniversary of D–Day so I waited.

"Long after they happen," wrote historian William Manchester, "historic events take on an air of inevitability."

He was writing of D–Day, the invasion of Normandy that catapulted the Allies into Nazi territory. It was the beginning of the end of World War II, a conflict that had claimed millions of lives and would claim millions more before the wars in Europe and the Pacific ended.

"[W]e assume that the Germans in France never had a chance — that [Eisenhower's] crusade was as good as won," Manchester wrote. "It wasn't."

Historian Jim Bishop observed, "In the history of man, no force matched the assemblage of ships and men waiting in chaotic order along the south coast of England."

But the outcome was far from certain for those who were about to unleash that force — and all that most of the more than 150,000 Allied soldiers who were about to participate in it knew was that many of them were not expected to return. What they would encounter on those beaches was anyone's guess.

The landings along the French coast that day must have been frightful, a soul–scarring experience for all who survived — and thousands did not.

It inspired the most intense combat sequence ever made in the movies — 14 or 15 disturbing minutes in "Saving Private Ryan," which probably wasn't nearly as intense as the real thing.

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And more than a decade before "Saving Private Ryan" was made, it inspired one of the most memorable speeches of Ronald Reagan's presidency, delivered on the 40th anniversary of D–Day.

Perhaps Manchester was right about that "air of inevitability" stuff. In the rearview mirror of history, events always seem to be inevitable, don't they? No matter how lopsided or narrow the outcome turns out to be. They happened, and they're in the history books. It seems to be impossible to imagine a different outcome.

But that is with the benefit of hindsight, which they wisely say is 20/20. On the threshold of D–Day, there was much doubt — as there usually is before a critical mission is launched.

Eisenhower prepared a statement in case the invasion failed. He never had to deliver it, but it reveals the conflict that raged within his mind on the eve of the invasion.

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"Our landings in the Cherbourg–Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based on the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone."

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Combat has always struck me as being the closest thing to hell on earth that a human being is likely to endure. A battle isn't neat and orderly. It isn't like a football game or any other competition that is likened to war — because nothing else is like war. It is sure to be chaotic and terrifying.

(Before a battle begins, soldiers can't tell themselves it will all be over in 30 minutes or an hour — as a civilian might say about something he/she has been dreading, like a trip to the dentist or the Department of Motor Vehicles. Battles last as long as someone from each side refuses to give in.)

Even so, the success of D–Day was due to a combination of factors. The absence of any one might have meant the failure that Eisenhower clearly feared.

"Much has been made of the rough weather and how it hampered landing operations," Manchester wrote. "It was really a blessing" because essential German officers, believing the Allies would never invade in such conditions, were absent when the invasion began.

Radio broadcasts from Germany suggested that the Nazis knew an invasion would come, but there was disagreement about where it would be. At one point, Hitler believed the invasion would occur at Normandy and began moving forces and equipment into position there, but he changed his mind and agreed with his advisers, who believed the invasion would happen at Calais, farther north and a shorter trip across the English Channel.

"This was the best possible piece of luck for Eisenhower," Manchester wrote.

Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who was in charge of defending the French coast against the Allies, also was not present when the invasion began. He had left for Germany to celebrate his wife's birthday with her. There seemed to be no reason for him not to. Historian William Shirer observed, "There were the usual reports from German agents about the possibility of an Allied landing ... but there had been hundreds of these since April and they were not taken seriously."

The Germans had 10 panzer divisions available to repel the invaders; only one saw action, but it managed to drive back the British and force an extended battle for the city of Caen in northwest France. If even two or three additional panzer divisions had participated in the battle, the outcome might well have been different.

In Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt told his wife that the long–awaited invasion would occur in the morning. "She said she wished, in a way, that he had not told her," Bishop wrote, "because she knew she wouldn't sleep."

Roosevelt, "who could will himself to sleep, failed on the night of June 5," Bishop wrote. "[H]e was on and off the phone to the Pentagon until 4 a.m." By that time, FDR knew that the invasion was under way.

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And the tide of the war had turned. In Europe, anyway.

Of course, that part wasn't immediately clear — but it became clear in the days and weeks that followed.

By noon the day of the invasion, Winston Churchill notified Roosevelt that the initial landings had been successful, and Roosevelt summoned the press. He was in a jovial mood, but he cautioned the reporters that "[t]he war isn't over by any means.

"You don't just land on a beach and walk through — if you land successfully without breaking your leg — walk through to Berlin. And the quicker this country understands it the better."

The presidency always demands a certain amount of leadership skill, but it required a lot of it from Franklin D. Roosevelt in June 1944. As he was finalizing the plans for the invasion of Normandy, he was contending with the escalating cost of the top–secret Manhattan Project. He had managed to finance the project in the early years, Bishop wrote, by "manag[ing] to squeeze secret funds into the War Department budget,"

That month, the head of the Manhattan Project reported needing $200 million immediately. "[S]omeone would have to take Congress into this most secret of projects," Bishop wrote.

Roosevelt dispatched Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Gen. George C. Marshall and Office of Scientific Research and Development director Vannevar Bush to lobby congressional leaders for huge appropriations with few, if any, questions asked.

"It wasn't an easy assignment," Bishop wrote, "but leaders of both parties worked it out."

And, while few may have realized it at the time, the tide of the war in the Pacific had turned as well.

Democrats Not Likely to Catch a 'Wave' in 2014

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The federal shutdown ended this week — just in time to avoid default.

As the government shutdown dragged on, I heard some Democrats gleefully anticipating a "wave" election next year that will restore a Democrat majority to the House of Representatives.

With public opinion polls showing Congress' approval at record low levels, I suppose that is a normal reaction, even one to be expected, but history simply doesn't support it. Frankly, it sounds a lot like the talk that was prevalent four years ago, just after Barack Obama took office, that held that Democrats would be in charge of things for a generation, at least.

Of course, history has been turned on its ear in the last two presidential elections. A nation that had never so much as nominated a black man for president before 2008 has now elected a black president twice. With Gallup reporting that, less than a year after Obama's re–election, congressional approval is at 11%, doesn't it follow that Republicans in Congress are in, to use a George H.W. Bush expression, deep doo–doo?

Well, that assumes that a midterm election is really no different than a presidential election — and that simply has not been true historically. It wasn't even true in the first midterm election of this president's tenure. Less than two years after he took office with stunningly high approval ratings (when there was literally nothing of which to approve or disapprove), Obama saw his party lose more than 60 seats in the House.

Democrats regained eight seats in 2012, but that was achieved with the president's name at the top of the ballot. Having Obama on the ballot brought out many voters who typically do not vote, just as it did four years earlier. But, without him on the ballot, those voters reverted to historical form and did not participate in the 2010 midterms.

At best, Obama will be an advocate for others in 2014 — that is, when he chooses to participate. He didn't tend to lend much support to Democrats who were on the ballot in 2010 until it was too late to make much difference.

The great unknown about 2014 is the impact that Obamacare will have. In the first 2½ weeks, there have been conflicting accounts about the success or failure of the initial efforts, mostly focusing on the woes of the websites being used to enroll people. In a year, it will be clearer how the system is performing, whether it is delivering everything that was promised, and that is sure to influence the election.

But this year's shutdown will be forgotten. After all, another one is looming in just 90 days.

The midterms in the sixth year of a presidency have been, historically speaking, brutal for the president's party. The exceptions to that truly are few and far between.

No doubt, Democrats will recall that they fared all right in the midterms that were held in Bill Clinton's sixth year in office, but that was more backlash against the Republicans for going ahead with unpopular impeachment proceedings than anything else.

Sixth–year midterms typically go poorly for the party in the White House. Recent history tells the tale. George W. Bush's Republicans lost both chambers of Congress in 2006. Ronald Reagan's Republicans lost the Senate to the Democrats in 1986. In the sixth year of the Nixon–Ford presidency, the Democrats (helped in no small measure by the Watergate scandal) padded their majorities in the House and Senate — by nearly the same number of seats they lost in 1966, the sixth year of the Kennedy–Johnson presidency.

Sixth–year midterms almost always go badly for the president's party, no matter how popular the president may be. Reagan's approval rating was in the 60s in October 1986. Dwight Eisenhower's approval rating was in the 50s in his sixth–year midterm in 1958.

The more unpopular the president is, though (and it is worth noting that, while approval for Congress currently is historically low, Barack Obama isn't doing terribly well, either), the greater the challenge for his party.

There have been only two real exceptions to that in midterms in general in the last 80 years — 2002 and 1998 — and both could be said to have been due to unique (or almost unique) circumstances.

In 2002, the country was still reeling from the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Bush and the Republicans were rewarded for their efforts to stop terrorism with gains of eight House seats and two Senate seats. Four years later, in the "wave" of 2006, they lost 30 House seats and six Senate seats.

In 1998, Clinton's Democrats benefited from backlash against Republicans for their insistence on pursuing impeachment proceedings. They didn't really gain much, just four House seats and no Senate seats, but that's better than parties in their sixth year of occupying the White House typically do — and it was a whole lot better than Democrats did during the first midterm election of Clinton's presidency — when they lost 54 seats.

It's possible, of course, that 2014 will turn out to be a rare wave midterm that benefits the occupant of the White House, but, at the moment, it appears to be lacking the catalyst that could make that happen.

Even under the most advantageous midterm conditions, an incumbent's party hasn't won more House seats than Bush's Republicans did since 1902, exactly a century earlier, when both parties gained more than a dozen seats following the 1900 Census and the creation of 29 House seats.

Obama's Democrats need to win more than twice as many House seats as Bush's Republicans did 11 years ago merely to earn an extremely narrow edge in that chamber. To achieve that, it seems to me, Obama's agenda will need to gain some serious traction in the next year, but the steam seemed to have left that engine before the shutdown. There was already talk of how lame–duck status had been settling in even before Obama began his saber rattling over Syria. It might be set in stone by now.

Introducing the 'New' Nixon

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On this night 45 years ago, Richard Nixon delivered his second presidential nomination acceptance speech. He had been presenting himself as a "new Nixon" — which meant (presumably) that he had changed since the last time he sought the presidency in 1960 — and his speech on this night in 1968 was his opportunity to make his case to the American people.

Neither Nixon nor anyone who listened to him speak could have known that a burglary that wouldn't happen for nearly four years would lead him to make a very different kind of speech on precisely the same date six years later.

On this night in 1968, Nixon used the word "new" some two dozen times in his speech — most frequently with the word "leadership."

There was a genuine yearning for new in America in 1968. The war in Vietnam had been losing support steadily since Walter Cronkite delivered his commentary on the war in February (in which he famously declared that the United States was "mired in a stalemate" and could not win).

People on both sides of the fence were dissatisfied with how things were going in Southeast Asia. You could see the defections in the declining poll numbers — in support of the war and in support of the administration that was conducting it.

Just about every other policy was satisfying no one. Race riots had occurred in just about every major city. Crime was seen as out of control. Environmental policy was under fire.

Many people think America today is a polarized nation. But it really can't compare to the America of 1968.

Nixon told the Republican delegates — and the folks watching at home — 45 years ago tonight that it was time for "new leadership."

That kind of appeal — or something like it — is typically made by the nominee of the out–of–power party. But when Nixon ran in 1960, he represented the party that had been in power for the previous eight years, and he had no real choice but to defend the policies of the Eisenhower administration of which he had been (and still was) a part — even the policies with which he may have disagreed.

He couldn't very well appeal for new leadership when he had been part of the old leadership.

Nevertheless, defending the Eisenhower administration probably wasn't such a hard thing to do. In the fall of 1960, Gallup consistently reported that President Eisenhower's approval ratings were in the upper 50s.

In 1968, after eight years of Democratic rule, Nixon was running as the challenger. He was freed from the yoke that incumbency can be. He was his own man, a "new" Nixon, and he wanted everyone to know it.

Eight years earlier, Nixon had not taken advantage of the asset the popular Eisenhower had been until the final weeks of the campaign. It was believed by many that Ike made a difference, helping Nixon close the gap nationally and in several states. Had it not been for Eisenhower, the 1960 campaign might not have been as close as it was.

It was very close, one of the closest presidential elections in this country's history, but Nixon came up short.

In 1968, Nixon was destined for another cliffhanger, but he would face it as his own man, no longer beholden to Eisenhower although Nixon did make a personal appeal to the delegates on Ike's behalf. Eisenhower was in Walter Reed Hospital when Nixon delivered his speech, and the former vice president implored the delegates to "win this one for Ike!"

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Nixon was already confident of victory — or, at least, he seemed to be. He assured the delegates there was a distinction between his 1960 campaign and his 1968 campaign. "This time we're going to win," he said.

I don't know if he truly believed that, but he was convincing — in his way.

Nixon went on to explain to the delegates and the viewers at home why that was so. "My fellow Americans," Nixon continued, "we are going to win because our cause is right. We make history tonight — not for ourselves but for the ages. The choice we make in 1968 will determine not only the future of America but the future of peace and freedom in the world for the last third of the 20th century."

As Nixon outlined what he saw as the challenges facing America, he said, "[L]et us begin by committing ourselves to the truth — to see it like it is and tell it like it is — to find the truth, to speak the truth and to live the truth — that's what we will do. ... The time has come for honest government in the United States of America."

Ironic, considering the legacy of lies the Nixon administration ultimately would leave behind.

There wasn't really anything new in Nixon's speech, historian Theodore H. White wrote. "[T]hose who had followed [Nixon] could transmit, at the end of every 10th sentence, the tested punchline. What was new was context and frame. He was saying exactly what he thought: it was to be the campaign of a conservative but not the radical conservatism of Barry Goldwater driving from the party all those who disagreed; it was a centrist conservatism, inviting both extremes to a unifying moderation."

The American people, desperate for honesty in government after being repeatedly deceived in the Vietnam years — and some, perhaps, believing Nixon when he said he was a "new" Nixon — responded to Nixon's call.

And that, too, is ironic because, six years later — to the day — Nixon announced that he would resign, revealing that there never was a "new" Nixon — just the old one in disguise.

A Force of a Different Color

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"It is hereby declared to be the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin. This policy shall be put into effect as rapidly as possible, having due regard to the time required to effectuate any necessary changes without impairing efficiency or morale."

Executive Order 9981
Issued by President Harry Truman
July 26, 1948

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Harry Truman desegregated the U.S. armed forces on this day in 1948.

Some people cite this as an example of true presidential courage. Truman was running for re–election in a nation that was only starting to deal with its racial problems. His electoral prospects had been regarded as dim for months — ever since Gallup reported his approval rating was 36%. The New Deal wing of the Democratic Party had been trying to persuade Dwight Eisenhower to run as a Democrat, but he declined, and Truman was nominated by his party in mid–July.

Not quite two weeks later, he signed an executive order desegregating the military — and ushered in the modern civil rights movement.

The civil rights movement existed before Truman signed that executive order. While some may assign a different starting point, I have long believed that the Supreme Court's Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896, which upheld segregation under the "separate but equal" doctrine, is when the civil rights movement became more than a series of isolated acts. It was in the years following that decision that the NAACP was formed and the efforts for racial equality became more coordinated.

It is often implied, if not suggested outright, that segregation only existed in the South, but it was a national fact of life, and attempts to change that were largely symbolic until Truman desegregated the troops 65 years ago today.

Skeptics may observe — and with justification — that Truman's order was mostly symbolic as well, given the fact that it was not treated as seriously as it should have been for years. And, as I say, there also are those who believe it was an act of genuine presidential courage. It may have been.

But I wouldn't necessarily label it a completely altruistic act. In the context of the times, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss political influences.

At the Democrats' convention in Philadelphia earlier that month, the progressive mayor of Minneapolis, Hubert Humphrey, gave a stirring speech that prompted the delegates to adopt a stronger stance on civil rights. Truman unhesitatingly endorsed the plank, but delegates from Mississippi and Alabama walked out in protest.

Prior to this date in 1948, there was a certain amount of concern among Democrats about the prospects for their national ticket — as well as rumors (which proved to be true) of a schism that might lead to a split in the form of a third–party challenge. In fact, from what I have read, the only Democrat who thought Truman had a chance to win was ... Truman himself.

In fact, there were two challenges to Truman in 1948 — aside from the challenge from Republican nominee Tom Dewey, who had lost to Franklin Roosevelt four years earlier. The challenge from the right came from South Carolina's Strom Thurmond. The challenge from the left came from Henry Wallace, Truman's predecessor in the vice presidency.

Recent Gallup polls still had Truman's approval lingering in the 30s. He may have felt he had little to lose — other than members of his base who might otherwise choose to stay home in November. That may have been at least part of his motivation for issuing the order.

He may also have felt that the current of history was moving in the direction of desegregation.

In many ways, it was a symbolic gesture. Although the order called for its provisions to be "put into effect as rapidly as possible," there was foot dragging in its implementation.

Because of that, many modern historians will say the modern civil rights movement began with 1954's unanimous Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling.

I suppose that is hard to dispute. Segregation had been the virtually unchallenged law of the land since Plessy v. Ferguson, but Truman's order was the first real crack in segregation, and it set things up for Brown v. Board of Education to wedge it wide open — and, in the process, set up the ripple effect that transformed America from a segregated society to an integrated one.

That is the history of the American civil rights movement. I am often inclined to think that American segregation was destined to fall — like the Berlin wall.

But transformations of this magnitude are not historically inevitable, and even when the wheels are set in motion, they can be exceedingly slow to turn.

Truman got the wheels turning on this day in 1948.

Ike and Joe

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It is ironic, in its way, that President Barack Obama and former Gov. Mitt Romney will meet in the first of three presidential debates tonight.

A debate, I have heard people say, is the one setting in which voters can see candidates for office as they really are — not as their campaigns wish them to be seen.

Some people would have you believe that politicians are different today than they used to be, that a system in which politicians will do or say anything to be elected is some kind of recent phenomenon.

But that is not the case.

If you read the history books, Dwight Eisenhower comes across as a wise leader, reasonable, above the pettiness of traditional politicians, a man whose experience as a warrior sharpened his principles. To an extent, all that is true, but it is not the whole story.

With the considerable benefit of historical hindsight, we know that Eisenhower was elected president in 1952 with more than 55% of the popular vote and more than 80% of the electoral vote. We also know that Eisenhower won Wisconsin with almost 61% of the popular vote.

In hindsight, it seems inevitable that Ike would win — and by a significant margin.

But, on the ground in the fall of 1952, before anyone had cast a ballot, all political observers knew was what had happened in recent years. After two decades of Democrat control of the White House, no one knew what to expect even though the Truman administration was deeply unpopular, and the state of Wisconsin, once a mostly reliable Republican state, had voted Republican only once in national elections since the stock market crashed in 1929.

State elections were a different story. In the race for the U.S. Senate in 1946, Republican Joseph McCarthy had been elected. In the course of that six–year term, McCarthy launched his search for Communists and Soviet spies and sympathizers inside the U.S. government, and he was seeking re–election in 1952.

The Eisenhower campaign apparently felt it would be a good idea to have Ike align himself with the popular McCarthy, but the problem was that Eisenhower's basic philosophy and McCarthy's differed wildly.

They were not, to put it mildly, compatible. Yet Eisenhower chose not to use the occasion to come to the defense of his friend and colleague, General George C. Marshall, who had been frequently criticized by McCarthy.

(McCarthy had often spoken of the "20 years of treason" of the Roosevelt and Truman presidencies, and he didn't hesitate to label Marshall a traitor.

(McCarthy later amended his timeline to include the early years of Eisenhower's administration.)

A defense of Marshall had been part of the initial drafts of a speech Eisenhower was to deliver in Green Bay, but he left it out of the final draft at the urging of supporters who were afraid he might lose Wisconsin if he was seen as quarreling in public with McCarthy.

A New York Times reporter discovered what had been done, and an article appeared in the Times, prompting considerable criticism of Ike for abandoning his principles — and his friend.

Most of the time, Eisenhower treated his allies and adversaries the same — respectfully — but McCarthy's approach was to intimidate his foes via accusation. Absence of proof — and there was a lot of that — did not deter him one bit.

Eisenhower went on to receive even more votes in Wisconsin than McCarthy did, and many Republicans hoped McCarthy would be muzzled by the GOP's new authority in Washington, but Eisenhower, never one of McCarthy's admirers, declined to confront him.

Supposedly, Eisenhower didn't want to "get down in the gutter with that guy" because he felt that a public rebuke by the president would be giving McCarthy precisely what he wanted.

But if he had shown the political courage to confront McCarthy, he might have spared the nation McCarthy's later excesses on the national stage.

Forecasting an Incumbent's Chances

We are just about six months away from the 2012 election.

In the early days of my collegiate career, I was a political science major, and one of the things my professors drummed into my head (and the heads of my peers) was the conviction that voters reach their conclusions about an incumbent about six months before the election.

That is a piece of conventional wisdom that has held up rather well, whereas I have found that people who rely on surveys that measure the likability of an incumbent inevitably are misled.

When times are generally good, as they were when George W. Bush ran against Al Gore, voters can afford the luxury of picking the presidential candidate with whom they would rather share a beer. (Of course, the incumbent wasn't on the ballot that year.)

But when times are not good, likability takes a backseat to competence with most voters. In 1972, for example, when Richard Nixon was seeking a second term, the Vietnam War was still unpopular and there was some dissatisfaction with the economy, but voters were influenced more by whether they thought he was doing a good job (and most did) than whether they liked him (and most did not).

Job approval surveys didn't make their debut until Franklin Roosevelt had already won his second term — and FDR has always struck me as being a special case, having been elected president four times. The margins were different each time, and, of course, one of the issues when Roosevelt sought his third and fourth terms was whether any American president should be allowed to serve more than two terms. Some people who had supported him the first two times opposed him the second two times for that very reason.

Those campaigns for the third and fourth terms qualify as unique cases, therefore, and job approval surveys were still evolving, anyway, so the conventional wisdom of which my professors spoke isn't really applicable.

Nor, for that matter, is it applicable to 1948, when Harry Truman defeated Tom Dewey in an "upset."

I don't mean to suggest that Truman's victory wasn't a surprise (it was) or that voters were insincere when they told pollsters they didn't approve of the job he was doing.

I'm just mindful of the fact that Truman was completing FDR's fourth term. He hadn't been elected president. He was elected vice president.

And, while I can't speak for everyone, I can say that I have never based my presidential preference on the identity of the running mate. Those who choose which ticket to support on that basis are all but assuming that the guy at the top of the ticket won't complete the term.

That strikes me as being the same thing as trying to prove a negative, and, at least in my opinion, it is the wrong way to choose a president.

(In 1980, I did know some people who supported Ronald Reagan because George H.W. Bush was his running mate, and they figured that there was no way Reagan could survive the term. They became increasingly frustrated as Reagan simply refused to die — even after he had been shot — and they wound up having to wait eight years until Bush was elected on his own.

(There are sure to be some who have voted on that basis in other elections. I'm confident there were those who voted against some Republican tickets because Sarah Palin or Dan Quayle were on them. But my gut feeling is that their numbers were few.)

Besides, job approval surveys were still evolving, as I say, and the 1948 election would have a significant influence on how such surveys were conducted in the future.

So I don't include Roosevelt or Truman in such comparisons. Approval polling methods were still primitive when they occupied the White House.

But, by 1956, when Dwight Eisenhower sought his second term, a lot had been learned.

For one thing, pollsters kept polling right up until Election Day. They didn't stop polling long before the election, as they had in 1948 because it was a foregone conclusion that Truman would lose.

In early May 1956, Gallup found that 69% of respondents approved of the job Eisenhower had been doing.

A lot of that may have been due to something of a wave of sympathy for Ike. He had suffered a heart attack about eight months earlier. If the May approval rating was influenced by his health, that wave crested well before Election Day 1956, but Eisenhower still carried 41 states and received 57% of the popular vote.

Eisenhower's successor, John F. Kennedy, died before the end of his term, and his vice president, Lyndon Johnson, had been president for less than a year when he won a full term.

Six months before the election, three–fourths of the respondents to a Gallup survey approved of the job that he was doing — but that, too, may have been the result of public sympathy.

Johnson went on to win the 1964 election by a landslide — but, four years later, the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War forced Johnson to drop out of the race, and a month after he did so, the approval ratings appeared to confirm the wisdom of his decision.

In April 1968, Johnson's approval rating, as reported by Gallup, dropped below 50% and never exceeded that number again. It was tumbling by May.

Consequently, Johnson's decision to drop out of the race seems prescient in hindsight. Odds are, he wouldn't have been successful, even if he had been renominated.

Nixon replaced LBJ, and his Gallup approval ratings in May 1972 hinted at what was to come.

Nixon's job approval six months before the election was somewhere between 54% (his rating in late April) and 62% (his rating in late May). On Election Day, more than three–fifths of the voters endorsed his bid for a second term.

One can argue, of course, that Nixon's campaign was tainted by the illegal activities of his staff and his own involvement in efforts to cover up those activities. But the bottom line is that the job approval ratings pretty accurately measured how voters felt about the Nixon presidency in mid–1972.

Nixon's second term was cut short by the Watergate scandal, and his replacement, Gerald Ford, enjoyed high approval ratings in his first month in office, but his ratings declined rapidly after he pardoned Nixon.

In May 1976, he received approval ratings that hinted at what would happen in the election. For members of Barack Obama's staff, it might be instructive to study the Ford campaign because Ford's approval in mid–1976 was close to where Obama's has been lately — just short of 50%.

Ford, of course, went on to lose to Jimmy Carter in a very close election. Some people have been tempted to presume that it was almost entirely because, not having voted for him to begin with, voters felt no real allegiance to Ford — but he lost largely due to his job performance, because he pardoned Nixon, not because voters stopped liking him. He was still affable Jerry Ford in the minds of most.

But voters did not like the decision to pardon Nixon.

The voters definitely soured on Carter by the time he sought a second term in 1980, and the approval ratings six months out did more than hint at that. In May 1980, Gallup found that the share of voters who approved of the job he had been doing was in the upper 30s and lower 40s.

When the voters went to the polls that November, Carter received 41% of the vote and carried six states. Reagan was elected in a landslide.

In 1984, Reagan won a second term in spite of a jobless rate that was higher than it had been for any successful incumbent in nearly 50 years.

It was conceded at the time that Reagan was widely liked by the American people, but their electoral endorsement of his presidency in November was foreshadowed by Gallup polls in May that indicated that (1) a majority approved of the job he was doing, and (2) that majority was growing, not declining.

When the votes were counted in November, Reagan received nearly 59% of the vote and carried 49 states.

Reagan's vice president, George H.W. Bush, was elected in 1988 when Reagan was constitutionally prohibited from running again, and his lightning–like victory in the Gulf War seemed to be propelling him to a second term — but a funny thing happened to Bush on the way. A recession derailed him.

The recession was mild by historical standards — certainly when compared to the one that Americans have been slogging through since late 2007 — but it was bad enough to lower Bush's approval ratings from the 50s in late 1991 to 42% by May 1992, according to Gallup.

Once again, it was a reliable predictor of the incumbent's fate. Bush went on to lose to Bill Clinton in a three–man race.

The economy was better four years later when Clinton sought his second term.

Clinton's Democrats lost control of Congress during the 1994 midterms, but Clinton, through a combination of shrewd political moves and sheer good fortune, was on an upward trajectory in May 1996. Six months before the election, CNN/Time reported that 51% of Americans approved of the job he was doing; Gallup found that 55% approved.

The endorsements were solid, if not resounding — as were November's election returns. Clinton was re–elected with 49% of the vote and the support of 31 states.

In 2000, of course, George W. Bush defeated Gore in the Electoral College but lost the popular vote. Although extremely rare, such an outcome was not unheard of — but, to be old enough to remember the last time it happened, one would have to be at least 130 years old when Bush was elected — and there were no job approval surveys in those days.

That probably made Bush something of an exception to the conventional wisdom concerning the relationship between job approval numbers and eventual electoral verdicts on incumbents — since he hadn't received the support of at least a plurality of the voters the first time, as nearly every duly elected president has.

But the job approval rule still held true when Bush sought his second term in 2004.

The job approval ratings in May 2004 warned Bush that he would face a close race in November. NBC/Wall Street Journal, Gallup and other surveys in early May found about as many Americans who disapproved of his job performance as approved.

And that was borne out in the general election, when Bush received less than 51% of the vote and the support of 31 states. In the Electoral College, he defeated John Kerry by 35, 286 to 251.

What will all this mean in the 2012 election? I guess that remains to be seen.

Next Sunday is precisely six months from Election Day, so any job approval numbers that are announced on or after that date could be said to be potential indicators of what to expect in November.

But Gallup reports that, according to his job approval average for his 13th quarter in office, Obama's ratings are below the average for presidents who went on to win re–election.

They're even below one president — Carter — who was defeated in his campaign for re–election.

J. Robert Smith makes intriguing observations in American Thinker that speak to the relevance of history — even though he doesn't connect the dots between job approval ratings and an incumbent's odds of winning a second term.

"Presidential election history gives us indications," Smith writes, "that Mr. Obama either squeaks back into the White House or gets an undignified boot in the back of his designer trousers. ... [O]nly Jerry Ford lost his re–election bid narrowly. Odds are, if Mr. Obama loses, it will probably be on the order of [Herbert] Hoover (1932) or Carter (1980)."

Fourth-Best President Ever?

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"I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president — with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR and Lincoln — just in terms of what we've gotten done in modern history."

Barack Obama
60 Minutes interview

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My, someone certainly has a high opinion of himself and his place in American history.

I didn't watch the president's recent interview on CBS' 60 Minutes, but, apparently, in a segment that was not aired originally, he claimed that his administration's "legislative and foreign policy accomplishments" were as good or better than any other "with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR and Lincoln."

As I have said here before, I'm something of an amateur historian. I minored in history when I was in college, and I have always had an interest in the American presidency and American politics in general.

I'm also a journalist. That was my major in college, and it is the subject I am teaching now. I was trained to write and to think in Associated Press style, which constantly strives for clarity and consistency. So, when a president compares his presidency to "Johnson, FDR and Lincoln," my question is, "Which Johnson?"

The statement, you see, is imprecise. There have been two presidents named Johnson. I'm pretty sure I know which one Obama meant — Lyndon, who succeeded John Kennedy nearly 50 years ago, not Andrew, who succeeded Lincoln nearly 150 years ago.

Until the Clinton presidency, Andrew Johnson was the only president to face an impeachment trial in the Senate — where he was acquitted by a single vote. He chose not to seek a full term on his own in 1868.

A Siena College survey that was released in July 2010 rated Andrew Johnson as one of the five worst presidents in American history.

No, I'm quite sure Barack Obama did not mean to compare himself to that President Johnson. His image has undergone some changes in a century and a half, but, in recent years, he has been remembered as a "white supremacist."

I'm convinced the first black president in American history does not want to be remembered as comparable to Andrew Johnson.

Lyndon Johnson, on the other hand, is almost a Lincoln–like figure for American blacks — and he was responsible for the most advancements — in housing, education, employment opportunities, voting rights, in fact rights in general — for blacks and all other underprivileged Americans.

But LBJ, as I wrote about a month ago, had the misfortune of being a president who wanted to do great things domestically (which he did) but served at a time when foreign affairs dominated.

I wrote that Obama appears likely to turn out to be LBJ in reverse — a president who first ran for the presidency because he wanted to end a war and wound up being undone by his inability to tame the economy.

In addition to teaching journalism, I have also been teaching basic writing, and one of the things I try to impress on my students is the importance of using the right word to express the right thought.

That isn't an easy thing for most people — even people who earn their livings (or who have earned their livings) as writers struggle at times to find the right word. I know I do. Most of the time, I keep a thesaurus within arm's reach whenever I sit down to write — and there are still times when I choose the wrong word.

Nor is it easy to select the right word when one is being interviewed without some notes or a TelePrompTer to help. Consequently, I do have some sympathy for Obama. I have seen many people "misspeak" (to use a word that was particularly popular during the Watergate days) in such a setting.

But this wasn't the first time Obama has been interviewed by someone. Far from it. He is no novice when it comes to being interviewed. He just has a tendency to stick his foot in his mouth when he does.

When Obama suggests that his presidency is the best in history "with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR and Lincoln," I really have to marvel at his use of the word "possible" and what it implies.

In hindsight, Obama himself might admit that it wasn't the most prudent word choice he could have made, but I believe it speaks volumes about what he really thinks of himself and his presidency.

I think he really does believe his presidency, in its first two years, accomplished more than any other president — but he will allow for the possibility that LBJ, FDR and Lincoln accomplished more.

Lincoln is kind of a no–brainer. The Siena survey listed him third, and most surveys rank Lincoln in the top three.

FDR was the top–rated president in Siena's survey, which is also kind of a no–brainer. The only president to be elected four times, he guided the country through its worst economic crisis ever and is credited with leading it through World War II even though he died a few weeks before hostilities ended in Europe.

But Siena's survey did not rank LBJ in its Top 10. Apparently, Obama holds him in much higher esteem than most historians — at least the ones who were surveyed.

They ranked Theodore Roosevelt second. Roosevelt is remembered for several achievements — trust busting, conservation, labor laws, public health and safety laws — that continue to influence American life.

T.R. was the first American to receive the Nobel Prize — but, unlike Obama, he was rewarded for an actual achievement (negotiating the resolution of the Russo–Japanese War), not merely for his potential. By his omission from Obama's statement, though, it appears the president thinks his accomplishments in his first two years were greater than Roosevelt's.

The survey listed George Washington as the fourth–best president, and that should be a no–brainer, too. He is remembered as the father of the country, its first president. Thanks to his selflessness (he declined the salary that was offered to him, preferring not to tarnish, in any way, his image as a public servant) and his insistence that the leader of the new country should not be a monarch, we call our presidents "Mr. President," not "Your Highness."

It set the tone for the last 200 years, but I can only conclude that Obama also believes his contributions to American life in his first two years as president are greater than Washington's.

The Siena survey ranked Thomas Jefferson fifth. Once again, that should be a no–brainer, shouldn't it? Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, and there are few documents in recorded history that have had the kind of influence on a culture that it has had.

Jefferson also was responsible for the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the United States at that time — and still represents roughly one–third of its land mass.

But, apparently, Obama feels his accomplishments in his first two years exceeded Jefferson's.

Sixth in Siena's survey was Jefferson's successor, James Madison. Before becoming president, he was the "Father of the Constitution." As president, he sought to continue Jefferson's policies, but he may be largely remembered for the crumbling of U.S.–British relations and the War of 1812, during which the White House, the Capitol and many other public buildings were burned.

Seventh in the rankings was Madison's successor, James Monroe, whose signature achievement probably was the Monroe Doctrine, which established the Western Hemisphere as the United States' sphere of influence and served notice to Europe that any attempt by any of its nations to interfere would be seen as an act of aggression and treated appropriately.

Ironically, America has not re–elected three consecutive presidents since Monroe's re–election in 1820. If Obama wins a second term next year, he would match Monroe's electoral achievement — but, apparently, he believes he has already bested Monroe as a president.

Siena's eighth–ranked president was Woodrow Wilson, a leader of the progressive movement. A Wilson biographer, John M. Cooper, wrote that Wilson's record of legislative achievement, which included child labor reform, the Federal Trade Commission Act and the Federal Farm Loan Act — was unmatched by any other president except FDR, and his advocacy of women's suffrage helped lead to the ratification of the 19th Amendment.

Perhaps it is subliminally, but Obama seems to think that what he did as president in 2009 and 2010 is greater than what Wilson achieved nearly a century earlier.

Ninth on the list was Harry Truman, whose low point in his approval ratings (22) was unmatched by any president until Obama's immediate predecessor, George W. Bush.

But that doesn't tell the whole story of Truman's presidency. From the day he succeeded FDR in April 1945 until he won the 1948 election, Truman did great things in spite of the fact that he had been virtually ignored by Roosevelt in his 82 days as vice president.

He knew nothing of the Manhattan Project, which gave him the weapon that he used to bring the war in the Pacific to a quick conclusion. The attitudes about his use of nuclear weapons in 1945 have changed over the years, but at the time and for years thereafter, it was believed to have saved hundreds of thousands who, it was said, would have perished in a fight–to–the–death invasion of Japan.

He had to deal with the transition from a wartime economy to a peacetime one, which always seems to be uneasy but was especially so after World War II. There were several economic conflicts that had gone unaddressed during the war years but boiled over when the war ended; Truman managed to deal with them all.

He was an advocate of the "Fair Deal," national health insurance and civil rights.

I would guess that Obama has quite a bit of respect for what Truman did as president — so much that he is clearly trying to duplicate Truman's "upset" victory in his re–election campaign in 1948. Truman won a full term largely by running against a "do–nothing Congress," and that seems to be Obama's strategy as well.

For that to work, you need a solid record of achievement to contrast with Congress'. Obama clearly believes he does, and so do his adoring supporters, but, judging from presidential approval ratings, millions are not convinced.

They are not convinced for much the same reason that the people of the late 1960s were not convinced about LBJ. They felt out of sync with their president's priorities. He was focused on domestic issues, which were (and are) important, but they were more concerned about the meat grinder of Vietnam.

In modern times, Obama's highest approval ratings have been for his handling of foreign affairs — when Americans are hurting at home, struggling to keep a roof over their heads and food in their stomachs. They need jobs.

The Siena survey ranked Dwight Eisenhower 10th. Eisenhower earned Americans' respect when he led the Allies to victory over the Axis powers in World War II, and he presided over a country that was at peace in the world but suffering from some postwar growing pains in the 1950s.

His most lasting legacy, I suppose, is the interstate highway system — and his warning, in the final days of his presidency, against the growing influence of the "military–industrial complex."

Both continue to influence American life, but Obama thinks his achievements are equal to or greater than Eisenhower's.

Maybe they are, but that will be up to the voters to decide next year.