Salon.com > Lyndon Johnson

Triumph of the Tea Party mindset

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 13:12:00 +0000

Two stories that might seem to contradict each other ran in the New York Times this week. One declared the Tea Party movement “significantly weakened” in the wake of November’s elections and on its way to becoming “just another political faction.” The other noted that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell might be concerned about a potential 2014 primary challenge – enough to filibuster any fiscal cliff plan that President Obama and Democrats draw up, no matter how modest.

The problem, of course, is that the Tea Party’s power resides in Republican primaries, where conservative purists wreaked considerable havoc in the past two election cycles. This included, famously, McConnell’s home state of Kentucky, where the minority leader’s protégé was crushed in a 2010 GOP Senate primary by Rand Paul. Now McConnell has to worry about suffering a similar fate in two years, especially if his handling of the current fiscal impasse evokes cries of treason from the base. How could this square with claims of fading clout for the Tea Party?

Everything you know about the 1960s is wrong

Sat, 24 Nov 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Late 1964 was a buoyant time for the majority of Americans: a prosperous year that promoted extraordinarily high expectations about the future. As in the previous twenty years, large numbers of people were flocking to buy houses in the suburbs and climbing into the middle classes.

If there could have been a nationwide soundtrack for late 1964, it would have been especially upbeat, featuring hit songs by the Supremes (“Baby Love,” “Come See About Me”), the Beatles (“A Hard Day’s Night,” “I Feel Fine”), and the Beach Boys (“I Get Around”).

John F. Kennedy’s eloquent calls for a New Frontier had raised expectations his death could not dim. Liberals, led by President Johnson, redoubled their efforts for reform. In May, speaking before some eighty thousand enthusiastic listeners (including Republican governor George Romney) at the University of Michigan’s football stadium, Lyndon Johnson had called for congressional approval of a Great Society — a hugely ambitious set of domestic reforms and programs. That August, Congress appropriated $1 billion to support the Economic Opportunity Act, which promised to wage a “War against Poverty.”

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Getting the Carter treatment

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 16:33:00 +0000

It was announced this morning that Jimmy Carter will address next month’s Democratic convention in a videotaped message that will be featured in prime time.

For the former president, this represents a step up from last time around, when he was pointedly denied a spot at the podium and allowed only a brief, non-prime-time video message. This led to one of the more awkward scenes from the Denver convention; while Carter and his wife walked onstage to wave to the crowd after the video, the podium was lowered into the floor – almost as if convention organizers were making sure he didn’t get any ideas.

That treatment speaks to the very up-and-down relationship Carter has had with his party since leaving the White House in 1981.

For the first national convention of his post-presidency, San Francisco ’84, he was offered prominent seating, but not much else (you can watch him at the 2:20 mark here enjoying Mario Cuomo’s keynote address). Ronald Reagan’s reelection campaign was asking Americans “why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?” and Democrats weren’t eager to showcase the man voters had rejected in the last election. "In 1984, I was very unpopular with the Democratic Party," Carter said years later. “I had committed the unforgivable sin of losing.”