Thomas Lucente: Bush presidency most like Lincoln's

Thomas Jefferson said it best: "No man will ever bring out of the presidency the reputation which carries him into it."

President George W. Bush is no exception.

Bush, his followers and other Republican Party apologists have been working hard to compare Bush to President Harry S. Truman.

They like the comparison because Truman led the country into war and left office highly unpopular. More than a half-century later, however, Truman is viewed in a more favorable light.

Historian David McCullough, who wrote a biography of Truman in 1992, told The Washington Post that Bush is a fan of Truman's.

"I know that President Bush admires Harry Truman - we have talked about that," McCullough told the Post, though he was cautious about offering any assessments of the Bush presidency. "About 50 years has to go by before you can appraise a presidency - the dust has to settle."

McCullough went on to tell the Post that he sees similarities between Truman and Bush, especially in their capacity to endure "merciless criticism and personal abuse" that he doubts "many of us could take."

The comparison, though, is wishful thinking on Bush's part. While history will treat Bush better than his contemporaries, his popularity never will be as high as Truman's is today. After all, we won the Cold War. We can never win the amorphous global war Bush launched against terrorism.

Liberals like to compare Bush to President Herbert Hoover. That comparison is apt, but not for the reasons the liberals give.

The liberals like to perpetuate the myth that Hoover, faced with the 1929 stock market crash, did nothing to stop the economic crisis. They claim, wrongly, that he took a laissez faire approach to the situation and made it worse.

In reality, Hoover did exactly what his successor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, did. He foolishly tried to intervene in the market and stop the economic downturn. The only difference between Roosevelt and Hoover is that Roosevelt, after criticizing Hoover for his interventionist policies and overspending, turned around and did the same thing on a grander scale.

When the Depression hit, Hoover jumped right in and tried to save the economy through government spending and bailouts.

He created the Reconstruction Finance Corp. to give out loans and grants to banks, failing businesses, and local and state governments. He increased federal spending for public works projects through the Emergency Relief and Construction Act. He supported protectionist measures such as the Smoot-Hawley tariff as a means of reducing foreign competition and protecting American jobs.

He bragged about these measures at the 1932 GOP convention when he told delegates he had rejected the "disastrous" option of doing "nothing" and instead had "met the situation with proposals to private business and to Congress of the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the republic."

Like Roosevelt, Bush and President Barack Obama, Hoover erroneously believed government could spend its way out of an economic slump.

It is a ridiculous and failed notion.

Still, the better comparison to past presidents would be to President Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln, like Bush, entangled the United States in an illegal, immoral and unjust war. Lincoln, like Bush, was the "decider," and if you found yourself on the wrong side of Lincoln, you likely found yourself imprisoned.

Lincoln ran roughshod over the Constitution while pursuing his single-minded goal of preventing the Southern states, which joined the Union voluntarily, from choosing to leave that same Union.

For example, Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, shut down newspapers and arrested those who protested the war. He imprisoned political enemies indefinitely in the name of preserving the Union.

Lincoln blatantly ignored the Constitution, ruthlessly expanded the power of government and tore the nation apart with a bloody and unnecessary war that killed nearly 700,000 Americans. Rather than seek a political solution with the Southern states, he decided to use the might of the U.S. Army to attack and kill his fellow Americans.

While Bush shares similarities with Hoover and Truman, his real legacy of ignoring the Constitution, expanding the power of government and a stubborn, unwavering commitment to a misguided single-minded goal makes him more like Lincoln.

You can comment on this column and other issues on Lucente's blog at www.lucente.org or on LimaOhio.com. You can also listen to Lucente on "Talk with Ron Williams" at 3:10 p.m. Thursdays on WZOQ (940 AM) or at www.espnlima.com. He will also guest host the show from 3 to 5 p.m. Friday.