Some disagree but I think the democrats were the “bad guys” from the beginning of the party.
I hate Truman’s guts, perhaps in reaction to Republicans often speaking well of him, it’s become a meme among Republicans, for example in 2008 in a GOP POTUS debate when asked to name the best rat President of the 20th Century all of them said Truman. Some wartime simpatico BS. I would have been unable to answer that question, it’s like naming the best venereal disease.
Cleveland was the last RAT President who wasn’t a piece of garbage, and before him, Polk, elected in 1844! You gotta back to 1928 with Al Smith to find even a failed rat nominee who wasn’t a rank socialist.
Harry was far from competent, he was almost as unqualified for the job as Obama, the product of the Kansas City rat machine of Tom Pendergast. His speeches from ‘48 sounded just like AL Gore. I don’t give him credit for fulfilling his minimum job requirements by not surrendering to Japan. Only a poor, overconfident campaign by Dewey and a farm recession saved his ass in ‘48. Modern historians have rescued his reputation from the toilet bowl where it belongs. He actually bottomed out at a lower approval rating than W. Bush, it was just 22% (Gallup poll) in early 1952, it was under 40% for most of his tenure, and he still has the lowest average, one tenth of % lower than Jimmy Carter’s, and Carter didn’t have an 87% high in the middle of 1945 like Truman did.
As I’ve often said, if Free Republic existed back then, he would have been loathed here. This is SOB that vetoed the Taft-Hartley act.
If you wanted any $$$ for your district for anything Johnson would make you pay with your votes for his bills.(probably where earmarks came from)
He got the VRA passed which included those chains on GOP Southern states on making their own voting laws.
~ 40 years later GWB and a GOP congress extended THAT SAME BILL as is in 2006, including those same provisions, and then they got wiped out in that November by those who they helped vote against them.
Of course, Truman was the least destructive of the troika of potential FDR successors, that being Henry Wallace (who might’ve hesitated on atomizing Hiroshima & Nagasaki) and the execrable Bill Douglas of Supreme Court infamy.