Obama, the New Lyndon Johnson
It was the winter of conservative discontent.
Barry Goldwater had gotten only 38 percent of the vote, and his party had suffered its worst thrashing since Alf Landon fell to FDR in 1936.
Democrats held 295 House seats, Republicans 140. They held 68 Senate seats to Republicans’ 32, and 33 governors to the GOP’s 17.
Democratic registration was twice that of the GOP. The liberal press was gleefully writing the obituary of “The Party That Lost Its Head.”
Decades might pass, it was said, before the GOP recovered from its fatal embrace of right-wing radicalism and foolish rejection of the leadership of Govs. Nelson Rockefeller and William Scranton.
Wrote Robert Donovan in the opening lines of his book, “The Future of the Republican Party”:
“The devastating defeat of Barry Goldwater at the hands of voters in all sections of the country but the Deep South has damaged, weakened and tarnished the party. For years to come … the two-party system will be crippled.”
Donovan and all the rest were wrong. The GOP came roaring back in 1966 to capture 47 House seats and eight new governorships. In 1968, Nixon led the party out of the wilderness and into a White House it would hold for 20 of the next 24 years.
Full of hubris in 1965, Lyndon Johnson had seized his moment. He had launched a Great Society that would outdo his beloved patron FDR. He would dispatch 500,000 troops to Vietnam to “bring the coonskin home on the wall” and create a “Great Society on the Mekong.” Those were heady days of “guns-and-butter.”
By 1968, LBJ’s coalition was shredded. Gov. George Wallace had torn away the populist right. Sens. Gene McCarthy, George McGovern and Robert Kennedy had rallied the antiwar left against him. LBJ and Hubert Humphrey were left to preside over a shrinking center.
Why did LBJ fail? He overloaded the circuits. He tried to do it all. He misread a national desire for continuity after Kennedy’s death as a mandate for a lunge to the left and a great leap forward with the largest expansion of government since the New Deal.
By 1968, racial riots had torn apart almost every great city. The most prestigious campuses had been rocked by student violence. Thousands of antiwar demonstrators had taken to the streets. And 100 to 200 body bags were coming home from Vietnam every week.
By the winter of 1968, Lyndon Johnson was a broken president.
History never repeats itself exactly. But Barack Obama is making the same mistakes today that LBJ made in 1965.
He has ordered 17,000 more U.S. troops into Afghanistan, as the situation deteriorates and the NATO allies pull out. He has no exit strategy. He has read a repudiation of George Bush as a mandate for a government seizure of wealth and power that exceeds anything attempted in the Great Society.
Fully half of the $3.55 trillion in spending Obama will preside over this year will not be covered by tax revenue but by red ink. The money will have to be borrowed from abroad or printed by the Fed.
Not only is Barack running a deficit four times as large as Bush’s largest, he has called for $1 trillion in new taxes on America’s most successful, who have already seen their savings and pensions ravaged.
He wants a cap-and-trade system to deal with a global-warming or climate-change crisis many scientists believe is a hoax. He is going to provide health care for all, including immigrants, millions of whom arrive uninsured every year. He is going to plunge scores of billions more into education, though education has eaten up the wealth of an empire, as SAT scores sink further and further below the apogee of 1964, before LBJ and the feds barged in. He is going to ask Congress for authority to spend another $750 billion rescuing the banks.
He is going to find the cure for cancer. He is going to ensure every kid gets a college education. He is going to drop half of all wage-earners off the tax rolls, while the top 2 percent, who already pay 40 percent of all income taxes, are forced to cough up more.
Obama is misreading the election returns. When America voted to cancel the White House lease of Mr. Bush, it did not vote Barack Obama a blank check.
By misinterpreting his mandate, Obama has accomplished something John McCain could not — unite the Republican Party and instill in it a new esprit de corps. For the Obama budget is an insult to the core belief of the party — that free people, not coercive government, should shape the character of society.
By daring Republicans to fight on the issue of a $1.75 trillion deficit, Obama has liberated the GOP from any obligation to him. He has come out of the closet as a radical liberal spoiling for a fight over an agenda of radical change.
Sooner than any might have thought, we have clarity.
COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
Newly rediscovered purpose and clarity for Republicans is one thing, enduring moral conviction and hardened resolve to serve honorably is quite another.
Buchanan wrote:
“When America voted to cancel the White House lease of Mr. Bush, it did not vote Barack Obama a blank check.”
Really? Name an election where a President got a clearer message to do damn near *everything* differently than his predecessor.
“By misinterpreting his mandate, Obama has accomplished something John McCain could not — unite the Republican Party and instill in it a new esprit de corps. For the Obama budget is an insult to the core belief of the party — that free people, not coercive government, should shape the character of society.”
Ah that’s nice, Buchanan trying to make cuddly with the very party that’s treated him like a dog. (And would continue to do so today if it could be forced to acknowledge him.) And in the course of doing so invest that party with a virtue (of having any “core belief” whatsoever) that that Party has so recently and so spectacularly rejected.
Way to stay out in the cold for another decade or more; saddle yourself on the Republican horse. Way to ensure that if you do ever come out of the cold you’ll have another Georgie Bush as your representative who has learnt *nothing* from history and is determined to repeat its every mistake.
How in the world can anyone look at the leadership of the Republican Party and not simply feel disgust knowing of their Bush enablement?
Their betrayal of every core virtue they were *supposed* to have before?
Yeesh.
So let’s see… all we need is 483,000 more troops in Afghanistan, another Tet offensive, race riots, the assassination of the most popular candidate, a President not running again, antiwar riots at a major convention, Wallace-style racist demogoguery, a VP who refuses to disavow an unpopular war until it’s too late, and a cynical Republican candidate with a ‘secret plan’ to end the war… and then, despite the Republicans having NO plan to fix the current economy, and utterly being discredited by having been in charge while things went completely down the tubes… it will be 1968 all over again? Get real, Pat. Industrial policy, immigration reform, a conservative foreign policy… the Republicans will go there when pigs fly. You’re on your own.
[...] Repeats LBJ’s Mistakes Written by Patrick Krey on March 10, 2009 – 11:13 am – From PJB at TAC: History never repeats itself exactly. But Barack Obama is making the same mistakes today that LBJ [...]
I would wager that both Libertarians and die-hard Lefties would feel threatened by PJB’s prediction (or advocacy) of the GOP rallying around conservative principles. I would think that conservatism – embraced and practiced by a major party – might threaten their cherished beliefs that the republic is doomed (Libertarian), and the only solution to what ails America is an enlightened State with lots of “plans” for how to fix America and the world (die-hard Lefties).
It sounds like PJB’s main point is right on. Obama is ambitiously rushing to realize every long-forestalled vision of the activist state that the Left has concocted while in the wilderness. In the past, ambition of that scale has led to trouble for those that exercised it. That’s what happened to LBJ (and to GWB). Sounds pretty solid.
Mr. Buchannan is absolutely right.
So right, that even my Democratic friends that supported Obama are opposed to his reckless spending proposal.
Didn’t Obama run on *not* running up the deficit??
Clarity isn’t worth much if all principle is dispatched the moment Republicans are given the reins. I can’t see them regaining the White House or Congress anytime soon, but if they do, odds are that they’ll behave like drunken sailors once again.
Why do we need political parties?
I thought Republicans liked deficits. Doesn’t it keep spending down? Didn’t the lauded Ronald Reagan run up trillion$ deficits?
You can almost see the conservative Kumbaya wishful dream sequence above PJB’s head as he’s writing this essay.
Jack Tracey wrote:
“I would think that conservatism – embraced and practiced by a major party – might threaten their [Libertarian] cherished beliefs that the republic is doomed….
You know I’ve changed my mind on Buchanan’s trumpeting of the Republican Party’s virtues such as its “core beliefs” and patriotism. Look at how fearlessly its members sprang to the defense of that obvious patriot like Freeman from the attack on him by Steve Rosen and his friends. Especially that Republican from Illinois, Mark Kirk….
Oh, no … wait a minute … that’s right: It *didn’t* do any springing, and instead did a lot of disgusting silence, and Kirk was right there shoulder to shoulder with Chuck Schumer attacking Freeman.
Ach, that’s alright, no doubt it’ll get back to its “core beliefs” tomorrow. After all, what’s a little failure to come to the aid of a patriot being attacked by a guy formally charged with treasonous behavior? Sure, the Republicans just lost their way a little bit there. And over that tiny little chunk of time known as the Bush years too, but of course they never lost their “core beliefs.” They just *hid* them real well.
No wonder that one of its two measly remaining constituencies is comprised of people who vote on the sole basis of how ostentatiously you say you love Jesus.
Cheers,
Why is it that every time Bat Buchanan writes a column commenters here heap abuse on him as though he is personally responsible for all of the foibles of the Republican party. It’s rather like blaming the missionary for the savages.
Thom Meehan wrote:
“Why is it that every time Bat Buchanan writes a column commenters here heap abuse on him….”
Well I like Buchanan in the main so I didn’t think I was abusing him. I just thought he was wrong in seeing the Republican Party as having any salvageable virtue left, at least so soon with so many of the same hacks who enabled Bush still there. But I’d admit that Buchanan’s being wrong is only a mistake made from hope rather than anything else.
And while I didn’t criticize him for it however, (in fact because I admire it), I would also say that I think Buchanan’s view that government as Leviathan can really be undone now is just a vain hope. And I think that modern conservatives just have to swallow this finally and start thinking from that unfortunate new base-line.
Spending and the size of government didn’t shrink under Reagan even, but at least he left with some credibility left of Republicans opposing big government. But even if this present meltdown hadn’t occurred spawning all this incredible spending and growth, after Bush who had that credibility anymore? Certainly not the Republicans.
And now of course we *do* have the meltdown, and the vast majority of economists and Republicans too saying we have to now spend at least some trillions to get out of it.
So it’s a new day I think. Given what’s happened who is going to be sympathetic to the Republican’s defining mantra about the glories of the unrestrained free market and the great responsibility of the giant corporations and banks and financial institutions?
And did Bush do anything about the insane cost of health-care when he was in? No, he was more interested in playing Lawrence of Iraq. So good luck Republicans or anyone now telling the public not to take the Democratic/Obama alternative.
Or did Bush use the surplus he inherited from Clinton to pay down the national debt, or establish a real trust fund for the Baby Boomers’ Social Security and Medicaid? Or to fund some health-care relief? No, not really, he ratcheted up the debt like a drunken Kennedy couldn’t even have dreamed.
Or did Bush do anything to keep the price of oil low, like having reasonably friendly policies towards the arabs, or use that surplus money in any way for energy so as to blunt the call for government to institute some gigantic new energy policy? No, he wanted wars instead, remember, and look at what the price of oil is now and what it could have been for all those years we were in the thick of his wars which would have blunted Obama’s call for a remaking of the entire economy on the alter of an “energy policy.”
So sure, go tell the public that Obama’s wrong on all this. I think he is as to this and that in large measure, but what alternative did I have given what Bush and the Republicans did? Elect John McCain? Put Twitchy in charge of the button? Bwaahaahaaa!
If the Republicans had even a molecule of authentic, classical conservative principle left they’d shut the hell up for awhile, if only out of shame for what they allowed and did under Bush. And use that time to come up with some careful, considered alternatives to what Obama is proposing. Because right now they have less than zero credibility, and indeed every time they open their mouths all they are doing is extending the time during which they will be regarded as having less than zero credibility.
That doesn’t mean Buchanan’s hope otherwise isn’t admirable. It’s just rather spectacularly vain I think. The sooner the Republican Party is utterly, totally remade or even killed off the better; it provides absolutely no hope right now for sure.
Cheers,
Tom B, Nothing personal. I have to agree that the GOP disgraced itself by not repudiating Bush well before the final crack-up. It”s very difficult to do, but that was the challenge, to renounce a sitting President of one’s own party. Was it President Harrison that was formally disavowed by his own party?
Think how well they could be doing now if at least a decent percentage had done the right thing. The only hope for them now is to let some Governors take center stage after having accomplished something worth bragging about. It’s possible that the Governor of South Carolina is such a man.
The Democrats are no better. Bill Clinton could count on their supine acceptance of whatever he did, no matter how disgraceful.
Thom Meehan wrote:
“The only hope for them now is to let some Governors take center stage after having accomplished something worth bragging about.”
Thom, never though of that myself and I can’t think of any other idea that even half so much offers a chance as same. The Republicans oughta dump this Steele guy and hire you.
They won’t though, so in a way I still feel right that they’re hopeless, but *theoretically* at least I think you’ve given them some.
Very thoughtful idea. Very very thoughtful.
Cheers,
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