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Roosevelt and Truman Put On a Masterclass On How to Message [1]
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Date: 2025-07-27
The Republican Party is very good at messaging and winning elections — and is terrible at governing. Conversely, the Democrats are a mixed bag when it comes to messaging but we’re very good at governing. What that means is we Democrats have lost elections that we should have won. We lost elections in 2000, 2016 and 2024 after very successful presidencies because — in part- we didn’t take credit for our successes and didn’t inform the voters about past Republican failures.
Republicans never mention the many failures of past Republican presidents. There used to be a cult of personality regarding George W. Bush among Republicans but he went down the memory hole after his presidency collapsed. Few people remember that the economy was losing 800,000 jobs per month in 2008 and that there were over 200,000 casualties in the botched invasion of Iraq.
Similarly, the GOP never mentioned Trump’s failed response to the pandemic during the 2024 campaign. Trump told us to shine a light up our fannies and inject disinfectants. According to The Lancet, Trump’s negligence caused approximately 180,000 unnecessary covid deaths.
We can’t entirely blame the GOP for this cover up of recent history. The mainstream press never mentions past Republican failures. Moreover, we Democrats deserve a share of the blame. We didn’t talk about Bush and Trump’s failures during subsequent campaigns. The voters have short memories and they have to be reminded of these catastrophic failures.
In sharp contrast to the Republicans, the last three Democratic presidents have been successful. You wouldn’t know that from listening to the legacy media. The reality is that the “liberal” mainstream trashed Biden for four years and ran down the economy. In addition, the press never mentioned the successes of the Clinton, Obama and Biden presidencies.
During the Clinton Presidency, 22 million new jobs were created, unemployment declined from 7% to 4%, median family income rose, and poverty declined to its lowest rate in 20 years. The Clinton budget also converted what was then the largest budget deficit in American history to a projected surplus of $5.6 trillion over the next ten years. Hillary Clinton worked with Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch to provide insurance coverage to more than 8 million children.
When Obama was president, the unemployment rate was reduced from 10% to 4.7%. In 2016 alone, the economy added 2.15 million jobs. Moreover, between 2009 and early 2017, the economy added 15.6 million jobs. That was the best record of job creation since Bill Clinton’s second term.
During the Obama Administration, 20 million formerly uninsured Americans obtained insurance. The uninsured rate was reduced from 18% to a record low of 8.6%. Lifetime limits in policies were abolished and insurance companies can no longer discriminate against the sick and the injured.
This is never mentioned by anyone but let’s never forget that Joe Biden ended the worst pandemic in over a century. When he took office, there was no plan to distribute the life saving vaccines. The American Rescue Act of 2021 funded the distribution of the vaccines. Every Republican voted no.
Biden also had an excellent record on the economy. Here are the highlights.
New jobs were created every month. This was a first.
34 straight months of unemployment rate at or below 4.1 %.
Wages up 4.1% over the past year, faster than 2.7% inflation.
The lowest unemployment rate of any outgoing president since Lyndon Johnson in 1969.
16.6 million jobs created under Biden administration.
We Democrats need to get the message out every election cycle about the successes of the recent Democratic presidents and the failures of Bush 43 and Trump. Voters have short memories and the Republicans rely upon voter amnesia. We need to refresh voter memories.
Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman put on a master class on how to message these themes.
In 1944, Roosevelt ran for an unprecedented fourth term during the height of World War II and in a time of full employment. By 1944, the economy had been steadily improving for eleven years and the Great Depression was in the rear view window. In this cycle, the Republicans falsely presented themselves as moderates and blamed the Democrats for the Great Depression. You can’t make this stuff up.
Roosevelt eviscerated these false GOP claims in his famous “Fala” speech of September 23, 1944:
“ The whole purpose of Republican oratory these days seems to be to switch labels. The object is to persuade the American people that the Democratic Party was responsible for the 1929 crash and the depression, and that the Republican Party was responsible for all social progress under the New Deal.
Now, imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery — but I am afraid that in this case it is the most obvious common or garden variety of fraud.
Can the Old Guard pass itself off as the New Deal? I think not.
We have all seen many marvelous stunts in the circus but no performing elephant could turn a hand-spring without falling flat on his back.
The opposition in this year has already imported into this campaign a very interesting thing, because it is foreign. They have imported the propaganda technique invented by the dictators abroad. Remember, a number of years ago, there was a book, Mein Kampf, written by Hitler himself. The technique was all set out in Hitler’s book — and it was copied by the aggressors of Italy and Japan. According to that technique, you should never use a small falsehood; always a big one, for its very fantastic nature would make it more credible — if only you keep repeating it over and over and over again.”
Harry Truman’s 1948 speech to the Democratic Convention echoed similar themes. In this speech, Truman cited the economic progress the American people had made since 1933. At the same time — like Roosevelt — he blamed GOP policies for the Great Depression: “The situation in 1932 was due to the policies of the Republican Party control of the Government of the United States. The Republican Party, as I said a while ago, favors the privileged few and not the common everyday man. Ever since its inception, that party has been under the control of special privilege.”
Unfortunately, we Democrats sometimes have neglected to follow FDR and Truman’s example and we have all paid a price for it. When Al Gore ran for President in 2000, the economy was booming and we were running our first budget surpluses in decades. Yet Gore ran away from Bill Clinton and his accomplishments — he almost pretended that Clinton didn’t exist. Nor did Gore mention the mess that he and President Clinton inherited from the Republicans.
During the election cycles when Obama was president, we Democrats once again neglected to follow Roosevelt and Truman’s game plan. In 2010, Obama was unfairly blamed for the Bush recession and bank bailout.
During the 2024 election, Democrats didn’t talk about the mess that we inherited and how we cleaned it up in the face of near treasonous GOP obstruction. Most voters had no idea that Trump’s first term ended in disaster. Many voters just had a vague sense that prices were lower in 2020 and foolishly gave Trump a second chance.
“Progressives are much too willing to cede history to the other side. Legends about the past matter. Really bad economics flourishes in part because Republicans constantly extol the Reagan record, while Democrats rarely mention how shabby that record was compared with the growth in jobs and incomes under Clinton. The combination of lies, incompetence, and corruption that made the Iraq venture the moral and policy disaster it was should not be allowed to slip into the mists.’..There’s a reason conservatives constantly publish books and articles glorifying Harding and Coolidge while sliming FDR; there’s a reason they’re still running against Jimmy Carter; and there’s a reason they’re doing their best to rehabilitate W. And progressives need to fight back.”. Paul Krugman
We as Democrats need to bring back Franklin Roosevelt’s and Truman’s game plan and remind the voters again and again that the Democrats are much better for the economy and the American people. As Harry Truman said: “The only new thing in the world is the history you do not know.”
Sources consulted:
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-philadelphia-upon-accepting-the-nomination-the-democratic-national-convention
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