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Tant: Truman campaign can guide Obama

"Being a President is like riding a tiger. A man has to keep on riding or be swallowed." So said President Harry Truman. President Barack Obama is riding the tiger right now, but he needs to learn some lessons from President Truman lest the beast devour him on the road to the White House next year.

In a cocky and combative address to Congress on Sept. 8, Obama exhorted Capitol Hill politicos to pass his proposed jobs bill "right away." Though the bill contains proposals that have been supported in the past by both Democrats and Republicans, the measure probably is dead on arrival since Republicans in Congress seem more committed to working for Obama to lose his job than they are to working for jobs for millions of citizens across this nation.

While Wall Street wallows in wealth, Main Street is mired in the miasma of malaise. Obama's push for jobs may well be a case of too little, too late. The president may already regret not putting America's joblessness crisis at the top of his agenda after his decisive electoral victory and the rosy afterglow of his inauguration. After nearly three years of craven compromises and cave-ins to the GOP opposition, President Obama may finally have learned a lesson from President Truman by vowing to crisscross the country crusading for jobs -- including his own.

During the election of 1948, the Democrat Truman was seen by most pollsters and pundits as a sure loser against the Republican standard-bearer, Gov. Thomas Dewey of New York. Plagued by a cantankerous Congress and challenges from disgruntled Democrats on his left and right like former Vice President Henry Wallace's Progressive Party and South Carolina segregationist Gov. Strom Thurmond's "Dixiecrat" campaign for the White House, Truman took his politics to the people.

Though counted out by most election watchers in the press and politics, Truman waged a vigorous though cash-strapped campaign. Crowds in big cities and small towns all across the expanse of America heard the battered but unbowed President Truman speak from the rear of trains during his grueling "whistle-stop" campaign that covered more than 30,000 miles in the waning days of the 1948 race for the White House.

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In the wake of the 2008 election, I argued that there was a tension between the way Millennials lived their lives — creating their own iPod playlists, designing their own Facebook pages — and the one-size-fits-all, industrial-era welfare-state policies of the Obama Democrats.

Instead of allowing Millennials space in which they can choose their own futures, the Obama Democrats’ policies have produced a low-growth economy in which their alternatives are limited and they are forced to make do with what they can scrounge.

Every parent who has given a youngster his or her own mobile knows that an individual kid is empowered in important new ways by owning the device. That power is far more than the social connectivity the kids enjoy. As Barone points out, in the virtual world accessed through the device, the youngster is no longer constrained to a one-size-fits-all scenario such as school classrooms and curricula demand.

I think the empowerment that a personal mobile connection to the internet gives an individual is as fundamentally transitional as what occurred at these pivotal historical events:

The network science unfolding in the 21st century will continue to give us clearer understanding and a new perspective on the fact that human creativity and progress emerge from patterns of individuals. Top down power and patterns stifle, whether it is in a political campaign or a classroom.

The individual is a node in a network. We are just beginning to understand ( see network science ) how connectivity both gives power to nodes link out, and wisdom to crowds. Today’s Millennials are like the new Athenian voters, Brit serfs with new liberties, and America’s Minutemen — enjoying new individual liberty and ready to fight to keep it.

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