For all of the recent comparisons made between Barack Obama seeking reelection in 2012  to Harry Truman in his stunning upset win of 1948, there are some sharp differences, and pundits should be more careful in saying “Give ‘em Hell Harry” can be replicated next year by “Give ‘Em Hell Barry.”

That was the conclusion last week of a respected historian who has written three books exploring important presidential years.  David Pietrusza, author of the widely praised books “1960″ and “1920″ on the presidential elections of those years, was in Washington, D.C., to appear on the weekly C-SPAN documentary, “The Contenders,” about losing presidential candidates who nonetheless influenced U.S. history.  He dropped by HUMAN EVENTS to discuss his latest election-year book “1948,” which brings to life Democrat Truman’s dramatic come-from-behind victory over much-favored Republican Thomas E. Dewey.

“Obama’s certainly trying to spin his reelection effort as 1948 redux,” Pietrusza told us, noting the analogies that have been made in HUMAN EVENTS following the President’s fighting Labor Day speech last month to CBS-TV correspondent Bill Plante’s question at Obama’s recent press conference about him following Truman’s lead by running against a “do-nothing Congress.”

The historian concluded, however, that Obama will have “certain problems in replicating Truman’s experience.  In 1948, unemployment was under 4%.  The U.S. was recording surpluses—not deficits.  There were no shooting wars.”  All of that stands in sharp contrast to Obama seeking reelection with unemployment at 9%, the deficit at a record high, and U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As for Plante’s question about Obama running against a “do-nothing Congress” as Truman did, Pietrusza pointed out that Truman ran against a Congress with Republicans controlling both houses, not just one.  In addition, he noted, “Truman recorded a better share of the Catholic vote than even FDR.  Obama is facing new challenges on that front even as we speak.”  He agreed with HUMAN EVENTS’ conclusion that Obama at his news conference Oct. 6 appeared to be embracing the far Left with his kind words about the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators.  This, he concluded, is far from ’48, when former Vice President Henry Wallace’s far-Left third party challenge freed Truman from GOP charges of radical control of the Democratic Party.  In Pietrusza’s words, “Obama tosses away the opportunity to paint himself in the middle by boasting that he’s a ‘class warrior.’ ”

“Obama’s style is the complete opposite of Truman’s in many ways—even in how they deliver their message,” the historian told us.  “While Obama remains teleprompter-dependent, Truman could not read properly from the written page to save his life—or job.  It was only when Truman spoke off-the-cuff that he truly became effective.  Truman’s whistle-stop tours brought him face-to-face with millions of ordinary Americans.  Obama’s tours are really structured to bring him face-to-face with donors who will donate millions.”

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WASHINGTON — Supposedly this White House has just made a
furious attempt to sink a book,
Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a
President, by Ron Suskind, which came out September 20. Jay
Carney, the White House spinmeister, spoke ill of it. Numerous
former White House staffers spoke ill of it. Carney said, “one
passage seems to be lifted almost entirely from Wikipedia.” Why
would a respected writer want to do that? I suspect that the White
House is going to be as effective in sinking Suskind as it has been
in keeping President Barack Obama’s polling numbers lofty.

The book tells us what we Obama critics have all been
saying since early on. This President is the most incompetent and
ideologically rigid president in American history. For my part I
began the refrain in July of 2009 with a comparison to Andrew
Johnson, who at least had the excuse that he was drunk most of the
time that he was in the White House. I continued it in August of
2010 when I complimented Jimmy Carter by saying he is no longer the
worst president of modern times (a compliment that has as yet gone
unacknowledged, I might add). And I have continued with monotonous
regularity, hazarding the prospect of becoming a bore. Yet I
suppose one is never a bore when one calls a Liberal hansdoodle a
hansdoodle even when he sits in the White House and has been called
all manner of genius by our Liberal elites. Remember when the
“historian” Michael Beschloss said Obama’s “IQ is off the charts”?
There will come a day when Michael explains that he was saying
Obama registered “off the charts” at the opposite end of
genius.

How are all the Liberal sages going to get out of their
absurd exaggerations of Obama’s modest gifts? Increasingly they
admit that Obama has chosen the wrong policies, but he speaks so
beautifully — using a teleprompter for the most measly address.
Ah, but he is so forceful. So is his former chief of staff, Rahm
Emanuel, when he dons his tutu. But he is curious, adventurous, a
sponge for new ideas. Actually he has been a hopeless socialist,
lost in Fabian abstractions.

Most of this becomes clear as you lug yourself through
Suskind. Skip the first 150 pages. The author needs an editor.
Settle with Suskind’s discussion of the fights between the boys and
the girls on the White House staff, and Obama’s utterly insensitive
meeting with the aggrieved ladies at a dinner he held to placate
them. One, a notably dumpy economist with all the sex appeal of
Paul Krugman, complains that “I felt like a piece of meat.” She has
the catchphrase wrong, of course, unless she was wearing a bikini.
Yet it tells you how confused the Democratic feminists have become,
even the economists.

Move on to Suskind’s first quote from economist Larry
Summers complaining to economist Peter Orszag that “We’re home
alone. There’s no adult in charge.” Settle on page 365 where the
speculations of us Obama critics are pretty much vindicated. There
is Obama’s inability to make a decision, his “drift,” his “loss of
interest,” and Summers once again. Orszag is quoted as telling
Suskind, “Larry would say to Obama, ‘I’ll make my argument first;
you can go after me.’” Orszag then recalls to Suskind something
Suskind was to hear from countless others, “I’m thinking, ‘I can’t
believe he’s talking to the president that way.’ I just don’t know
why Obama didn’t say, ‘I made that decision a week ago. Just do
what I say.’” Well, Obama probably did not make that decision a
week ago. In another meeting, after “a dozen arguments,” Suskind
writes, “Obama, in a voice that was softly dispirited, said, ‘Well,
if you guys can’t agree, I mean, we don’t have to do it.’” As I
say, this is from one page. The book continues, and makes very
painful reading even for me in all my vindication.

Suskind contains his narrative to Obama’s economic policy
and, to a lesser degree, healthcare. There is nothing in the book
about foreign policy or the way this President has conducted two
foreign wars and a worldwide effort against terrorism. My agents
tell me Obama’s conduct of foreign affairs and of the war on terror
are even more appalling.

Somewhere in the deadly proceedings Suskind calls in one
of the President’s still happy servitors, David Axelrod, who still
can sing of Obama’s “broad intellectual curiosity. He just fluidly
moves from one thing to another.” Ah, note those fluid moves, and
Axelrod assures us that “Obama will be one of history’s seminal
presidents.” I suppose that is true if our history is to include
national decline. I, however, see a better future.

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And the next President of the United States will be: teleprompter populist extraordinaire, Barack Obama.

Should the Republicans nominate one of the three current frontrunners – Mitt Romney, Rick Perry or Michelle Bachmann – Barack “Back-on-track” Obama wins (despite polls showing him with just a 41 percent approval rating) by playing the populist card he’s already begun to deal, forecasts Gerald Celente, Trends Journal publisher.

The President is already calling the bluff of his Republican foes, demanding a millionaire’s tax and daring a gridlocked Congress not to pass it.

“Warren Buffet’s secretary shouldn’t pay a higher tax rate than Warren Buffet,” Obama moralizes. “It is wrong that in the United States of America, a teacher, or a nurse, or a construction worker who earns $50,000 should pay higher tax rates than someone pulling in $50 million.”

Obama began rehearsing his self-described role as “warrior for the middle class” some months ago. In the Summer 2011 issue of the Trends Journal, we alerted subscribers to Obama’s populist campaign strategy:

Undaunted by his string of broken promises, in the Summer of 2011, the born-again populist positioned himself to retain his core Democratic base, while wooing swelling legions of the hard-pressed, desperate for a government handout … the out of work and down and out were left with a Hobson’s Choice: either take Obama or be left out in the cold by Republicans.

So, in a classic reversal of his recent stance as “Accommodator in Chief,” Obama now vows notto cut the one program most Republicans want to either eliminate or drastically reconfigure, but which voters hold sacred: Social Security. “Obama Plan Won’t Include Changes to Social Security,” read the Sept. 15 Wall Street Journal headline. As for Medicare, Obama has promised to “fix” it sometime in the future … well after the election.

And who gets hurt if Social Security and Medicare get cut? The 78 million retirement-age baby boomers who need the entitlements most, who can afford the cuts the least – and who vote.

“Their health costs are going up; their investments are going down. They’re deep in debt, most without enough to retire on, and the Republicans want to give them less,” notes Celente incredulously. “It’s a suicidal strategy that’s stranger than fiction. It’s as though the Republican campaign has been devised by insidious Democratic infiltrators.”

This is why the new, tough-talking Obama is painting Republicans as the party that “does everything for corporate America and nothing for middle America,” says Celente.

The Presidential Reality Show

Reflecting back on the debates between Republican candidates, Celente says, “This isn’t politics as an exercise in Democracy in action, it’s politics as show business for ugly people. Anyone who saw the September 12^th debate hosted by CNN witnessed an early episode of The Presidential Reality Show. It was a star-spangled, made-for-TV-spectacle appropriating the lowest common denominator elements of the World Wrestling Federation, the Miss America Pageant and American Idol.

“Given that this is what is passed off as political ‘debate’ in America, come Election Day, the American Idol winner (a.k.a. The President of the United States) will be the best performer. And Barack Obama has proven that he can out-perform and out-teleprompt them all – he will tell the teleprompted truth the audience wants to hear.

“Obama will blame Congress for everything that’s wrong with America. He’ll bring back the ghost of George W. Bush and the failed Republican fiscal policies – despite the fact that Democrats were in power for two years. He’ll avoid mentioning his role in keeping the Bush tax cuts in place and that he bailed out the banks, financial institutions and the too-big-too-fails and delivered nothing but empty promises to the foreclosed and unemployed he vowed to rescue.”

By the time the Republicans finally get around to choosing a candidate, Obama will have his “warrior for the middle class” message perfected.

The Leading Presidential Reality Show Contestants

Gerald Celente forecasts that Texas Governor Rick “Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme” Perry will not survive his many gaffes or be able hide his political baggage.

“On the hot button Obamacare issue, Mitt ‘Corporate Raider’ Romney has already out-Obama’d Obama with the Romneycare healthcare plan he pushed through as Governor of Massachusetts. And besides,” says Celente, “polls show that one third of Republicans won’t vote for a Mormon, which cancels out everyone who says they won’t vote for Obama because they think he’s a Muslim.”

As for Michelle Bachmann? In the highly unlikely event of her winning the nomination, she could never survive the heat or the intense personal scrutiny she’ll be subjected to on the campaign trail.

“Getting Elvis’s birthday wrong is surely forgivable, but warning that the rise of the Soviet Union is a great threat to America’s national security is borderline inanity. She makes Sarah Palin (who claimed she could see Russia from her backyard) sound like a sage,” observes Celente.

While Obama’s 41 percent approval rating is dismal, with 13 months before Election Day, it is not an insurmountable statistical gap to close. Ronald Reagan, the ultimate political actor, and Bill “Slick Willie” Clinton – at the same point in their presidencies – had only a 47 and 46 percent approval rating respectively, and they won reelection.

“As the teleprompter populist,” says Celente, “Obama’s every phrase will be carefully crafted. He rarely speaks off-the-cuff and seemingly never from the heart. And on a stage where performance counts more than the heart, fans (a.k.a. the electorate) will vote for the Best Actor. That actor will be the man who commands the stage, Barack Obama.

“If you can sell the American people Jersey Shore,” says Celente, “you can sell them another round of ‘Hope’ and ‘Change You Can Believe In.’”

Trend Forecast: In the Summer 2011 Trends Journal, Celente identified Jon Huntsman as the dark horse favorite, with Ron Paul next in line.

Over the long haul in the run for the nomination, the attacks launched by the three current frontrunners could succeed in discrediting them all. Under such circumstances it is not impossible that one or the other of the dark horses could win the race. Should that be the case, either one would have a better chance of beating Obama than Romney, Perry or Bachmann.

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Obama’s presidency lurches from fad to fad — from gays in the

military to “green jobs” to the “Buffett rule.” Hyped as a profound
presidency, it has turned out to be an embarrassingly frivolous
one. Sober historians of the future, not cowed by political
correctness, will no doubt look back and say that Obama fiddled
while America burned, indulging his sophomoric socialism,
environmentalism, and social engineering at a time of terrorism and
economic crisis.

The weighty and thoughtful orator of Democratic mythology
looks more like a glib used car salesman, and in his case most of
the used cars are electric. It is fitting that his hawking of cheap
environmentalist propaganda would lead him into the first major
scandal of his presidency. The Solyndra debacle is exactly what one
would expect from an administration determined to push the politics
of environmentalist conjecture at the expense of the American
taxpayer and economy.

Out of Obama’s implausible ideological insistence that
“green jobs” would bolster the economy, and the political need to
prove that claim, came a hasty loan to a dubious solar panel maker
that promised to create them. Obama leaves the American taxpayer
with a bill of over half a billion dollars for this environmental
lark, and it is only the most recent bill. His “green jobs” loan
guarantee program has been a bust, costing taxpayers tens of
billions for the creation of a pitifully small number of
jobs.

The Solyndra scandal stands as a symbol of the
administration’s reckless and unserious approach to the economy,
undermining job creators while propping up job destroyers. Needing
to divert people’s attention from the greed and irresponsibility on
display in the scandal, Obama now turns back to raw class warfare,
hoping to egg the poor and middle class into an idle hatred of the
rich. The great unifier seeks to set secretary against
boss.

Obama says his gimmicky “Buffett rule” is not class
warfare but simple math. Maybe he means the “new math” taught in
public schools. Senator Charles Schumer of New York must not have
received the “simple math” talking point; he admits openly that
Obama’s proposal is timed to capitalize on potential class
resentments in a bad economy. “When everybody went up, it was a lot
harder to make this argument,” he told the press. “I think the time
is ripe again. And I think the president sensed that.”

Obama’s half-baked Marxist musings with Joe the Plumber
remain his deepest thoughts on the purpose of taxation. He still
feels entitled to seize wealth and “spread” it around. When he says
that the rich aren’t paying their “fair share,” all he is saying is
that their money belongs to the government automatically for
redistribution. But that’s just theft masquerading as taxation. The
true principle of taxation is not the redistribution of wealth but
the financing of legitimate government activity, and under that
principle the rich are paying more than their fair share, as they
carry a disproportionate amount of those costs. Republicans should
resist the Buffett rule not just because it will inhibit job
creation and consumption but because it is a bald act of
theft.

America’s “jobs president” is more like a crooked Robin
Hood. Economic decline is not so much a crisis for him as a policy
and a pretext for ideological opportunism. Given the choice between
liberal ideology and the creation of jobs, he consistently selects
the former. He chooses unions over jobs, environmental regulations
over jobs, and trivial tax-hike gimmicks over jobs.

Obama’s blasé attitude about Solyndra, shrugging off an
enormous loss to taxpayers as no big deal, is part of this
ideological blindness and complacency. No failure ever prompts any
reflection on the wisdom of a liberal scheme; he just moves
forward, trying out new ways to present failed ideas as a boon to
the common good.

A popular slur among liberal pundits is to say that
Republicans oppose Barack Obama’s economic ideas because they want
the economy to stay sluggish before the election. The slur makes no
sense. If that were the Republicans’ crass calculation, they would
be supporting his ideas, as they are sure to make a bad economy
worse.

But it is not enough for Obama to damage the economy. He’s
also proud of shaking up the military. Just as he is making life
harder on businessmen through new taxes and regulations, so he now
makes life harder on generals through social engineering. The
media’s coverage of the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell has been
laughably propagandistic, designed to leave the impression that
everyone is thrilled with the change. The reality is that it
creates new headaches for generals who already have too many of
them. And there is no end in sight to the politicized struggles to
come. According to the Washington Post, gay activists have
a new cause to press upon a hidebound military — the “unknown
number of transgender troops serving in uniform without formal
recognition.” Perhaps this cause will dovetail with Obama’s next
likely innovation for the military, a full-blown women in combat
policy.

After all, he owes feminists a favor, having allowed,
according to author Ron Suskind, a “hostile workplace” for women to
fester in the White House. One would have thought Bill Clinton’s
presidency might have triggered that complaint. Instead, “I feel
like a piece of meat”-style complaints comes from Obama’s. Life in
the workplace has grown difficult everywhere under Obama, including
in his.

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The White House’s claim that this photo was taken during a press conference — not during the President’s chat with students — is legitimate. Still, I don’t think the storytime-rug and construction paper cutouts look very good next to the teleprompter he will be using for the State of the Union address.

Compare this to Sarah Palin’s eloquent and selfless resignation speech recently, which was entirely without teleprompter or notes, which can seen in part and read in its entirety at The Huffington Post.

From HotAirPundit:

“It’s not sufficient for the United States, or France or other members of the nuclear club simply to say all of you have to stop but we’re not gonna do anything to change ourselves”

So we really can’t tell Iran that they can’t have Nuclear weapons if we’re not gonna change ourselves? This coming from a sitting President? In Obama’s mind our possession of nuclear weapons is no different that a rogue regime having them, he sees America as some imperial power that has to be cut down to size to match every other country.

I am unaware of the United States saying it will wipe another nation off the map like Iran has with Israel, and just exactly how do you make nuclear weapons obsolete? Will North Korea suddenly give up their nukes in response to another meaningless U.N. resolution? Did resolutions work against Saddam Hussein? This is what happens you elect a naive inexperienced community organizer to be President.

One thing is absolutely gone in this Presidency, there’s not a single solitary part of Barack Obama that sees America as a shining city on a hill….