DH notes Johnson's stellar performance in getting the 1957 civil rights bill passed--the first such legislation since 1875--despite ferocious opposition from not only Southern rednecks but suspicious Northern liberals:
Barack Obama as LBJ is a metaphor worth pondering if one wants to understand Mr. Obama's difficulties with this project, and his presidency. The more useful comparison, though, isn't to LBJ's tortured 1960s presidency but to the famed Senate Majority Leader who in 1957 got a civil rights act passed.
Then and now, the job was getting the deal done.
From that January until Aug. 2, Johnson engaged in a mind-boggling effort of legislative politics, a story told across hundreds of pages in Robert Caro's "Master of the Senate." Johnson had to overcome the threat of a killer filibuster by the Old South Democratic bloc—led by the brilliant Richard Russell of Georgia—and the animosity and suspicion of northern liberals. Passing the bill, which enhanced voting rights for black Americans, was a remarkable legislative achievement. No civil rights legislation had passed since 1875.
More:
The idea that Obama should become LBJ, even in the glare of modern media, reveals how other-worldly our politics has become. Only a dilettante would believe a Barack Obama can walk in off the street and be LBJ. To read Caro's account of the hours, years, effort, savvy and muscle memory Lyndon Johnson built over a career to become "LBJ" is to know why Washington "doesn't work" anymore.
George Will, for his part, raises the Woodrow Wilson "progressive" analogy, albeit 44 is, GW writes, a "timid" one (hardly Wilson's style):
Whether all or nothing of the legislation becomes law, Barack Obama has refuted critics who call him a radical. He has shown himself to be a timid progressive.
His timidity was displayed when he flinched from fighting for the boldness the nation needs -- a transition from the irrationality of employer-provided health insurance. His progressivism is an attitude of genteel regret about the persistence of politics.
Employer-paid insurance is central to what David Gratzer of the Manhattan Institute calls "the 12 cent problem." That is how much of every health-care dollar is spent by the person receiving the care. Hence Americans' buffet mentality: We paid at the door to the health-care feast, so let's consume all we can.
Will notes 44's belief that if he wielded dictatorial power he could really fix it, and compares this to Wilson's own excessive faith in his own abilities:
"I would have loved nothing better than to simply come up with some very elegant, academically approved approach to health care, and didn't have any kinds of legislative fingerprints on it, and just go ahead and have that passed. But that's not how it works in our democracy. Unfortunately, what we end up having to do is to do a lot of negotiations with a lot of different people."
Note his aesthetic criterion of elegance, by which he probably means sublime complexity. During the yearlong health-care debate, Republicans such as Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee have consistently cautioned against the conceit that government is good at "comprehensive" solutions to the complex problems of a continental nation. Obama has consistently argued, in effect, that the health-care system is like a Calder mobile -- touch it here and things will jiggle here, there and everywhere. Because everything is connected to everything else, merely piecemeal change is impossible.
So note also Obama's yearning for something "academically approved" rather than something resulting from "a lot of negotiations with a lot of different people," a.k.a. politics. Here, too, Obama is in the spirit of the U.S. president who first was president of the American Political Science Association.
Wilson was the first president to criticize the Founding Fathers. He faulted them for designing a government too susceptible to factions that impede disinterested experts from getting on with government undistracted. Like Princeton's former president, Obama's grievance is with the greatest Princetonian, the "father of the Constitution," James Madison, Class of 1771.
I would add that Woodrow Wilson was no Master Legislator: He declined to make even modest compromises to get the Treaty of Versailles ratified by the Republican-controlled Senate in 1919. Two top Democratic pollsters see a "march of folly" in Democrats ignoring massive public opposition to ObamaCare, and thus courting electoral annihilation come November.
Bottom Line. "All or Nothing at All' worked for Frank Sinatra, but rarely works for presidents.
Letter from the Capitol, LFTC, 9/11, Economy, Conservative Politics
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