Jerry,

FDR probably scored the lowest IQ of any recent president. Walter Lippmann, the brilliant journalist who was at Harvard at the same time as FDR, dismissed him prior to 1932 as a brainless upper-class playboy. Truman was also dismissed, like someone we know, as a fumblemouthed hick who was way out of his depth on the international scene.

Speaking of which, John Lewis Gaddis has to my mind provided the best analogy to our current Dem-Repub standoff regarding the international situation. He says it’s like the pre-Cold War period of 1946-47, when the opposition party (Repubs under Taft) took an isolationist tack, refusing to confront the changed international situation squarely and bitterly criticizing every move that Truman made.

Substitute Kerry for Dewey and Bush for Harry S.; maybe also Stalin for Saddam and the mujahiddin(ex-allies of convenience transformed into mortal enemies of the US).

The good news, of course, is that the isolationist Taftite Repubs were discredited pretty thoroughly by Stalin’s aggressive moves in Greece and Turkey in 1947, and the Repubs shortly thereafter inaugurated a period of cooperation with the Dems in fighting the Cold War that lasted for over two decades.

What will it take for today’s Taftite/Father Coughlin types in the Democratic Party to renounce their increasing isolationist drift?