Rich Lowry: The Spirit of ’48

Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review.

You could almost hear the hands rubbing together in glee within Pres. Barack Obama’s political shop at the failure of the congressional supercommittee. How the president’s politicos must welcome a new count in the indictment against the “do-nothing Congress.”

The phrase famously originates from the 1948 presidential election when Harry Truman (who borrowed it from a reporter) used it to lambaste a just-elected Republican Congress and claw his way to an upset reelection victory. Hopeful Democrats think “Give ’em hell, Barry” can use the 1948 template to overcome his poor standing in the polls in another victory over another new, unpopular Republican Congress.

That the Truman campaign is a template at all is a measure of Obama’s desperation, and of his definitive termination of the politics of hope and change. We associate 1948 with the smiling, triumphant Truman holding up a post-election copy of the Chicago Daily Tribune with the erroneous headline "Dewey defeats Truman." That’s because there are no compelling photos of the low demagoguery that fueled his reelection....