Tag Archives: Lyndon Johnson

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Tea party takes it on the chin

Those silly tea party insurgents keep getting their heads handed to them.

Then they keep coming back for more.

The results from this past Tuesday showed that the Republican Party “establishment” is getting stronger while the tea party wing of the GOP is losing its punch.

http://thehill.com/opinion/ab-stoddard/206894-ab-stoddard-tea-party-left-in-the-dark

Tea party challenges lost Senate races in Kentucky, Oregon, Idaho and Georgia. Those equally nutty Republican primary voters decided to go with more “business-friendly” candidates, according to A.B. Stoddard, writing for The Hill.

The tea party has shown this amazing ability to present candidates who become true wack jobs. Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock sought Senate nominations and then made bizarre statements about women, rape and abortion. Remember Christine O’Donnell, the loon who ran for the Senate in Delaware? She proclaimed some fascination with witchcraft. You cannot possibly forget Sharron Angle in Nevada, who proved to be unsuitable at every level possible to serve in the U.S. Senate.

I don’t know what this means for the Republicans down the road. My hope is that sanity may be reasserting itself within the once-great political party.

House Speaker John Boehner in recent months has expressed his disgust with the clowns who have taken his House caucus hostage. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell actually has had the “temerity” to broker a budget deal with Democratic Vice President Joe Biden.

The tea party wing of the GOP has no shortage of goofballs. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas tops the list; Cruz actually is making fellow Republican Sen. John Cornyn, a fellow Texan, look and sound reasonable.

I am longing for a return of the mood in Washington when Democrats and Republicans could work together to solve national problems. Bring back the spirits of Republican Everett Dirksen and Democrat Lyndon Johnson.

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LBJ was the toughest of the tough guys

A friend and I were visiting the other day about New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s troubles over the bridge lane-closing fiasco.

Some of Christie’s critics have called him a bully. “I have a three-word answer to that,” my friend said. “Lyndon Baines Johnson.”

Agreed. Ol’ Lyndon was tough, vengeful, mean, coarse, profane … and whatever else you want to say about someone who knows how to exact painful revenge. I think my friend’s point is that LBJ makes Christie look like a piker in the bully department.

Then another friend wandered into my workplace the other day, Rick Crawford, a former Republican state representative who now sells commercial real estate in Amarillo. Crawford’s been around the political pea patch for longer than many folks. He grew up here, knows the lay of the land, knows many big hitters.

As we talked, the conversation turned to Lyndon Johnson. Crawford made a remark about LBJ’s decision to close the Amarillo Air Force Base in the late 1960s. He repeated something I have heard ever since I arrived here in January 1995, that Johnson closed the base because he “hated the Panhandle” and because the region voted for Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election, which LBJ won in a landslide.

Whoa. Not quite. I reminded my friend of something he admitted not knowing. It was that of the 26 counties comprising the Texas Panhandle, Goldwater won majorities in eight of them. And, I noted, Potter County — which is where the air base was located — voted for Lyndon Johnson.

So the question has lingered for nearly 50 years: Did Lyndon Johnson act out of spite or did he make a strategic decision based on a needs assessment given to him by the Pentagon?

Crawford and I talked about LBJ’s friends here who have insisted the president acted nobly. I have concluded that the LBJ-hates-Amarillo reason for closing the base has evolved into urban legend. It’s one of those things no one can prove, given that I am quite sure no one living in the Panhandle was in the room — the Oval Office, the Situation Room, the White House kitchen, wherever — when Johnson made that fateful decision.

The story, as it’s been told and retold over many decades since — and with embellishments added along the way — does illustrate President Johnson’s toughness.

I don’t doubt he was one mean SOB. I’ve read enough accounts over the years about how he treated those around him. I’ve heard many stories of how he could bully lawmakers into voting the way he wanted them to vote on legislation. I know all that.

However, I’m waiting for someone to prove he nearly destroyed the economy of a region in his home state just because a portion of it voted for the other guy in a presidential election.

Oh, but yes. Lyndon Baines Johnson was a whole lot more of a bully than Chris Christie ever thought of being.

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LBJ would have none of this

Barack Obama’s difficulty in calming the fears of fellow Democrats reminds me of something I heard from a prominent Texas Panhandle educator.

He declared that President Obama is no President Lyndon Johnson, the stalwart Texan who rose from Senate majority leader to the vice presidency and then to the presidency amid a stark national tragedy.

Obama cannot seem to find it within him, my friend said, to develop the kind of relationships he needs with lawmakers in his own Democratic Party, let alone with those on the other side.

Obama fails to calm jittery Dems

I’m trying to imagine President Johnson being bullied by Congress. I cannot frame that image in my mind.

Johnson had this way of getting in the faces — quite literally — of senators and House members. He would threaten them, cajole them, put the squeeze on them by embracing them in a massive embrace. The threats would come in the form of promises to cut off funding for pet projects if they didn’t see things his way. The cajoling would arrive in the form of promises to do right by them if they lined up behind his legislative agenda.

President Obama’s health care plan is in trouble with Republicans and Democrats. Republicans dislike the Affordable Care Act because, well, I guess it’s because Barack Obama pitched it, sold it and got it enacted into law. Democrats are running from it because they fear for their political lives with the 2014 mid-term elections coming up.

The president is quite good at selling the big idea. He’s quite bad at bringing others along.

Ol’ Lyndon is spinning in his Hill Country grave while one of his descendants struggles with getting Congress to follow his lead.

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JFK a liberal? Not so sure about that

David Greenberg, writing for The New Republic, posits a theory that President John F. Kennedy was a true-blue liberal.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115522/jfk-was-unapologetic-liberal

Interesting, eh?

The president, who was shot to death 50 years ago next week, cut taxes. He stared down the Soviet Union by flexing the nation’s military might. He also, according to Greenberg, believed government could be a force for good, not evil. Kennedy preferred diplomacy over armed conflict, Greenberg asserts, making him more liberal than conservative.

I suppose that’s all true.

Greenberg’s piece, though, doesn’t touch on some other key issues that defines liberals and conservatives.

How about abortion? I don’t recall much discussion over the years since JFK’s death about how he viewed women’s reproductive rights. The president was a practicing Catholic, after all. Even though he made it clear during the 1960 presidential campaign that church doctrine wouldn’t inform his public policy, many politicians before and since JFK’s time have relied on their faith to decide some of these critical matters.

Prayer in school? Did the 35th president oppose school-mandated prayer, which the Supreme Court essentially struck down in 1963?

Environmental protection is another favorite issue for liberals. It wasn’t until 1970 — during the administration of Republican Richard Nixon — that the federal government created the Environmental Protection Agency.

Kennedy did seek to further the cause of civil rights, but he had to be persuaded to do so. His death in Dallas prevented him from enacting the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. That was left to President Lyndon Johnson, whose courage helped the Democratic Party “lose the South,” in the words of his good friend, Sen. Richard Russell, D-Ga.

My own view is that JFK was more of a centrist than a bleeding heart.

Given the extreme views that both parties have adopted in the past two decades, that isn’t such a bad thing.

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Obamacare rollout numbers put in perspective

I got to listen to a lot of yammering through most of my workday today about the rollout of the Affordable Care Act and the enrollment numbers released today by the White House.

The yapping came from Fox News commentators who — not surprisingly — were calling the rollout a disaster and the initial enrollment figures a testament to the incompetence of the Obama administration.

Then I read this article one of my dearest friends on the planet shared on social media. It tells a different story.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115586/obamacare-enrollment-october-was-106k-says-hhs

It says essentially two things: One, while the enrollment numbers aren’t great, they compare favorably with the initial enrollment of those in Massachusetts who became covered under what’s been called “Romneycare,” which is former Gov. Mitt Romney’s version of a mandated health insurance policy enacted in his state. Oh yes, and Romney campaigned unsuccessfully for the presidency in 2012 by running against the Affordable Care Act. The second thing the article notes is that despite the troubles with the healthcare.gov website and all the hoo-hah associated with it, the computer program stands a decent chance of getting fixed.

But that’s not what the conservative media are telling us. They’re insisting that the ACA is a disaster. They say it will never work. They insist that the computer problems are but a symptom of a failed policy.

President Obama made promises he couldn’t keep, to be sure. He said no one would be denied health insurance if they were happy with the policies they have. That’s turned out to be not the case. Is it his fault? Well, he is the president of the United States, the man in charge. It’s on his watch and he should take the heat — which he is doing.

I am unwilling, though, to give up on the Affordable Care Act. I feel the need to remind my friends on the right — and on the far right — that Medicare rolled out in 1965 with some significant glitches in it.

President Lyndon Johnson was in charge then and he managed to work with congressional leaders of both parties to fix the program. Does anyone want to scrap Medicare now? I didn’t think so.

The article attached to this blog analyzes the problem with a decided lack of passion.

I think that’s how we all should examine the ACA and look for ways to improve it.

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Attention now turns to budget panels

Let us now focus our attention on some members of Congress — from both political parties — who have been given the task of working out a long-term federal budget agreement that prevents charades such as the one that just ended.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/17/politics/shutdown-over-main/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

Democratic Sen. Patty Murray and Republican Rep. Paul Ryan — who chair the Senate and House budget committees, respectively — are going to begin talking between themselves. They’re both serious politicians (no irony intended, honest) but their task is monumental, given the institutional refusal of both legislative chambers to adopt any kind of strategic approach to these problems.

We came within a few hours this week of defaulting on our nation’s debt obligations. The two-week-long government shutdown sucked an estimated $24 billion from the nation’s economy. It turns out we’ll pay our bills and the government has reopened fully.

President Obama signed the bills into law late Wednesday and said the end of this budget battle removes the “cloud of unease” that had been hovering over the financial world.

I beg to differ, Mr. President.

The unease has just taken a brief respite. It’ll likely return in January and again in February. The money to run the government runs out in January; our borrowing limit expires in February. Many of us out here believe we’ll be right back at it again when those deadlines approach.

Of the two budget panel chairs, Ryan has the more difficult task, given the role the tea party wing of the GOP — of which he is a member — played in prolonging the ridiculous drama that unfolded. The House Republican caucus will continue to fight to eradicate the Affordable Care Act, which only just now has been implemented. They don’t like it and predict all kinds of catastrophe will befall the nation if it is allowed to live on.

Ryan is considered to be a serious and thoughtful young man. I’m withholding my final judgment on him. I’m not sure he’ll be able to resist the enormous pressure he’ll feel from the extreme right wing of his party, although I retain some faith he’ll be able to work constructively with Democrats on his committee and with the likes of Chairwoman Murray in the Senate.

Here’s a bit of advice from out here in the Heartland. Work until you get a deal. You have no need to take extended recesses between now and Christmas. You have much to do and the public — into whose faces you spit when you closed much of the federal government — pay you folks a pretty fair wage to solve these problems.

Finally, Democrats and Republicans can learn from the memories of two presidents — Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan. Both men knew how to work the system. They perfected the art of principled compromise.

Now … let’s get busy.