The Democrats Need LBJ
EmailABC's Stu Schutzman reports from New York: Not so much President Lyndon Baines Johnson as Senator Lyndon Johnson. Senate Democrats need a leader like LBJ now more than ever. Johnson wouldn’t have stood for the current Democratic “debate” on health care reform. There would be little debate — he would have imposed his will on straying Dems and his will was considerable. This is not about the merits of health care reform but about politics and party discipline. Today, Democrats in the Senate are acting as if they are all scrunched into a meatball hero — squeeze one on one end and out pops another somewhere else. Democrats have historically had problems of unity and discipline — not prominent characteristics in Democratic DNA — but in this current climate, as the party in power, they’re blowing it. LBJ wouldn’t have stood for that. In the 1950s, LBJ rose like a rocket through the ranks of the Senate, from whip — which he wielded mercilessly – to Senate Minority Leader to Majority Leader. Johnson ruled Senate Democrats with an iron hand. Few ever got out of party line. He didn’t simply count votes, he squeezed them. Historians and political pundits mostly agree that Johnson was the most powerful and effective Senate Majority Leader ever. He accomplished that with an iron-fist. First off, he scuttled the seniority system for committee chairmanships. That gave him the power to hire and fire powerful committee chairs virtually at will. He threatened Senators’ political lifeblood — their pet projects; he gathered dossiers on them. He would threaten to use the dirt much like a powerful member of the old Soviet Politburo. The pressure Johnson applied was known as “the treatment” which “could last ten minutes or four hours” wrote journalists Roland Evans and Robert Novak in Lyndon B. Johnson: The Exercise Of Power. Johnson would confront his “targets” in private, one-on-one and summarily scream, scold, threaten and cajole them, twisting their arms before they knew what hit them. “Its velocity was breathtaking, and it was all in one direction. Interjections from the target were rare,” wrote Evans and Novak. “He moved in close, his face a scant millimeter from his target, his eyes widening and narrowing, his eyebrows rising and falling… an almost hypnotic experience and rendered the target stunned and helpless.” And he usually got what he wanted. This could be just the right prescription for today’s Senate Democrats as they in-fight and dither on the important issues of the day, health care reform not the least of them. Again, this is not about the merits of health care reform; it’s about discipline imposed by an iron-fisted leader who would reward loyalty and punish infidelity. A carrot and stick approach… but, ala LBJ, mostly a stick.
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That’s a horrible story. I should say a horrible person.
That’s not something to be proud of.
I would have buried that story if I WERE a democrat.
I wonder why LBJ did not run again?
Did someone dig up dirt on him?
What’s the real reason?
Posted by: ddg | November 23, 2009, 12:20 pm 12:20 pm
Maybe somebody pulled HIS ears!
Posted by: ddg | November 23, 2009, 12:27 pm 12:27 pm
Perhaps what is needed is not LBJ, but rather Ronald Reagan, who had to solve the mess Jimmy Carter got us into, with his social programs runaway spending, which saw one of the biggest financial messes, this country ever went through, between the Great Depression, and now, the Lesser Depression.
It would be nice if the Dems would come to the realization, that you cannot raise people from poverty, by throwing money at them. They have to be willing to work, and earn their own way.
I know….because I had to do it, for myself.
Posted by: Rick McDaniel | November 23, 2009, 1:09 pm 1:09 pm
Good Lord!
Why would the Demos want or need a leader like LBJ who got us into “The War on Poverty™” and brought us the welfare state.
You’re right Rick, the Dems need someone like Reagan so that they pass Health Care Reform that might actually work.
Posted by: Noz | November 23, 2009, 1:44 pm 1:44 pm
The dems already have an LBJ..just look at Obamas ears.. just ask Maureen Dowd ha ha
Posted by: mickey maoist | November 23, 2009, 2:04 pm 2:04 pm
Ha ha ha . . . Dems need LBJ? Surely you just! We’ve already got LBJ, reborn as Jimmah Cahtah, reborn as Obama . . .
Posted by: Dems Are Crazy | November 23, 2009, 2:26 pm 2:26 pm
Rick McDaniel wrote: “Perhaps what is needed is not LBJ, but rather Ronald Reagan, who had to solve the mess Jimmy Carter got us into, with his social programs runaway spending, which saw one of the biggest financial messes, this country ever went through…”
Nice attempt at re-writing history!
Jimmy Carter inherited a financial mess. If you’re old enough to remember, you might remember Nixon’s “Wage and Price Controls” and Ford’s “WIN Buttons” – Whip Inflation Now. Neither one worked.
Carter did not do much to straighten out the economy, but note that when Reagan took over, Carter left him with a 7.2% unemployment rate which Reagan’s “Trickle-Down Economics” promptly raised even higher than today’s double-digit unemployment. Even G H W Bush called it “Voodoo Economics”.
Reagan, by 1983, realized how his policies weren’t working and RAISED TAXES.
Yet, to this day, about 1/3 of the entire U.S. National Dept. is due to Reaganomics!
Posted by: The_Mick | November 23, 2009, 2:27 pm 2:27 pm
We got LBJ again. Obama is getting us into the next Vietnam, the next Great Society that is bankrupting us, and he will be a one term president just like LBJ. We will all be broke and speaking Chinese before it’s all over.
Posted by: vince | November 23, 2009, 3:49 pm 3:49 pm
History tells us that JFK wanted to dump LBJ. Just thought people should know.
Posted by: denn84116 | November 23, 2009, 5:03 pm 5:03 pm
It’s always a little depressing to read posts which ignore the contents of the blog or misstate them. The blog referred to LBJ the Senate Majority Leader, not the President. He was a very crude, but effective legislator serving under a Republican president. Unlike, Sen. Reid whose spine has the same consistency of an old piece of red licorice left too long in the microwave, Johnson would have passed a health care reform bill months ago. Today’s U.S. Senate is an embarassment for both parties.
Posted by: B.Bear | November 23, 2009, 5:38 pm 5:38 pm
This guy murdered JFK and Kennedy was exiting Vietnam, so we wouldn’t have suffered all that tragedy, and more if he hadn’t murdered Jack. The worst person ever, a dog of a human.
Posted by: Paul Hiiginbotham | November 23, 2009, 9:40 pm 9:40 pm
I respect the idea of LBG as a disciplinarian to the senate.
However, that requires the Senate to go out of their way to elect a disciplinarian as their leader.
People usually don’t do that. They put people in charge they like.
Posted by: Kadim | November 24, 2009, 12:16 am 12:16 am
ddg…your comment is straight out of the Republican playbook. We’re in this economic mess because sometime several years ago, many people became lazy and decided that they didn’t want to work any longer. What an intelligent insinuation! I suppose you suggest more tax cuts. If that was really the one-way ticket to economic prosperity, then businesses should have been booming by the end of Bush’s Presidency. However, it seems that the economy continually got worse until after he was out of office. Just as you can’t throw money at the poor to “entice” them to work, you can’t just throw money in the form of tax cuts at businesses because — news flash — they don’t HAVE TO invest and increase hiring due to the tax cuts. They can pocket the money however they wish. Of course, being a business owner such as yourself, I don’t blame you for wanting to pocket more money. Everyone would like more money.
Posted by: raxion | November 24, 2009, 4:37 am 4:37 am
When Medicare was passsed in 1965, LBJ was the president, not having been in the Senate for some years, but he knew how to bring legislators into line from his long experience with them. And Medicare passed in significant part because it had begun with John Kennedy, whose death, in 1963, led to a strong sympathy vote.
Johnson said that they decided things in the cloakroom, after which Senators made their speeches on the floor, presumably for public and media consumption.
LBJ maintained friendly relations with J. Edgar Hoover, the feared FBI Director, saying that he would rather have him inside the tent than outside it.
LBJ, as he knew himself, was no saint in his personal life, but it did not wreck his political career, partly because things were different then.
Posted by: Candadai Tirumalai | November 24, 2009, 9:15 am 9:15 am
A lot of Presidents were a mess on both sides.
Nixon? We know that story.
Carter? I’m from the south, and I was embarrassed for him.
We need to learn from it all and not be so stubborn. That goes for us all.
Posted by: ddg | November 24, 2009, 12:28 pm 12:28 pm
Raxion, please address your comments to the correct party.
Thank you every so much.
Posted by: ddg | November 24, 2009, 2:28 pm 2:28 pm
typo: that’s “ever so much”
Posted by: ddg | November 24, 2009, 2:30 pm 2:30 pm
The Kennedy’s disliked LBJ.
Didn’t you see the documentary?
It’s the documented truth.
Posted by: ddg | November 25, 2009, 10:10 am 10:10 am
Obamacrats! the most unprofessional
administration in the history of our
democracy. I just wish we could get the
bumbs out in two years instead of four.
Posted by: roy norton | November 27, 2009, 4:42 pm 4:42 pm