Bush as Truman

We commend to gentle readers today's WSJ opinion piece by William McGurn, former Bush speechwriter and current NewsCorp executive.

McGurn reminds the skeptical that the much-maligned Bush has been proved right on a number of big issues, like tax cuts, stem-cell research and the Iraq surge. Of course, "proved right" is still subject to interpretation of the data, but data there are.

We'll add two other items to the list headed "Bush was right," namely, Social Security and health insurance.

On the former, Bush advocated the introduction of private investment accounts. As we have noted before, born-again Democrats who insist on a budget surplus and Social Security "lock box" are in effect arguing that Washington should tax people beyond the rate of federal spending and invest the surplus for people's retirement. Bush thinks it's bad for Washington to make investment decisions and good for people to make them for themselves. But in 2007 his proposal died thanks to the doctrinnaire opposition of the Reid-Pelosi Congress.

On the latter, Bush advocated taxing high-end, employer paid health insurance and offering tax deductions or credits for individually purchased policies. The notion was to begin to make it easier for the uninsured to buy insurance and to fund government subsidies for those who can't afford insurance. Again, the proposal died in Congress without as much as a committee hearing.

In all this, we cannot help but compare Bush to Truman, a POTUS beset with a multitude of domestic and foreign problems, confronted by a difficult military situation, sometimes subject to the excesses of his own personality (government control of steel mills was not the greatest of Truman's ideas, nor was his intemperate letter to the critic who reviewed his daughter's voice recital), but over time proved right-headed in his most significant actions.