Mea Culpa, LBJ

The Nightingale's Song (1995) considers the effect of Vietnam on the lives of John McCain, Robert McFarlane, James Webb, John Poindexter, and Oliver North. While this blogger could never place himself in the company of these Vietnam veterans, nonetheless this blogger has spent the past forty-four years listening to his own nightingale and holding Lyndon Baines Johnson in contempt for the folly of that disastrous war in "hell in a small place." The election of 2008 was all about hope and looking forward. Kudos to Robert Bryce for pushing the fog of Vietnam away from this blogger's eyes and causing him to look anew at Lyndon Baines Johnson, 36th President of the United States of America. Amen to sin and redemption. If this is a (fair & balanced) acknowledgment of presidential greatness (past and present), so be it.

[x Austin Fishwrap]
LBJ Laid The Groundwork For Obama
By Robert Bryce

Four decades after Lyndon Johnson left the White House, his voice, his conscience, continues to reverberate in America. Indeed, Barack Obama's historic win is proof of the enduring triumph of Johnson's presidency. It's the consummation of two pieces of legislation that Johnson forced through Congress: the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Ironically enough, Obabma's victory also marks the end of Texas's dominance in modern presidential politics.

Obama's ascendance comes at the cost of the last Texas president we are likely to see for a long time: George W. Bush, the least popular president in the history of polling.

When Bush moves out of the White House in January, it will end a remarkable epoch in American politics, an era of unrivaled dominance by the Lone Star State. The numbers prove the point: Two of the last three U.S. presidents, and three of the last eight, have been Texans. By the time Bush hands Obama the keys to the White House, a Texan will have been either president or vice president for 28 of the preceding 48 years.

Bush got to the White House by taking advantage of the very trend that Johnson feared: In 1964, after Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, he reportedly told an aide, "We have lost the South for a generation." Johnson was right. Ever since he moved back to his ranch just west of Austin, the Old South has been solidly Republican and Texas has been the western bulwark of the GOP South.

Texas has been a fairly reliable barometer of success for candidates seeking the White House. Over the past 84 years — 21 elections — only three men have won the presidency without winning Texas: Obama, Bill Clinton (who did it twice, in 1996 and 1992) and Richard Nixon in 1968. Before Nixon, the last president to lose Texas and still win the White House was Calvin Coolidge, who lost the state to John W. Davis in 1924, the same year Congress granted citizenship to Native Americans.

Obama's win signals a shift in power away from the South in general, and, specifically, a shift away from Texas. The states of the old Confederacy aren't reliable Republican territory anymore. And Texas has a dearth of political stars who are likely to emerge as national players in the next few years.

In short, the election of Obama and the triumph of the Democrats signals a major shift in the balance of political power. And that shift is northward. Part of that shift is due to demographics and the huge influx of young voters in this election. It is also due to the enduring strength of Johnson's guts and vision.

Johnson's great sin was his continuation and expansion of the Vietnam War. But his great redemption was in passing the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. By muscling those two pieces of legislation through Congress, Johnson made real the promises set forth in the Declaration of Independence. On March 15, 1965, a week after violence erupted in Selma, Ala., over the rights of blacks to vote, Johnson delivered what's known as the "We Shall Overcome" speech. It contains many great lines, but perhaps the most notable was his rejection of "state's rights," the phrase that segregationists had used for decades to prevent blacks and minorities from voting. Johnson declared, "There is no issue of state's rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human rights."

Today, Johnson's legacy endures. The United States will soon have a black president from the state that gave us Abraham Lincoln. But it took a white president from Texas to make Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation a reality. And now that Lincoln's promise has reached its fruition with Obama heading for the Oval Office, the state that gave us Johnson has suddenly become far less important.

[Robert Bryce is the managing editor of Energy Tribune magazine. Bryce has been writing about the energy business for nearly two decades. His articles on energy and other subjects have appeared in numerous publications ranging from The Atlantic Monthly to The Guardian and The Nation to The American Conservative. His first book, Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego, and the Death of Enron, was named one of the best non-fiction books of 2002 by Publishers Weekly. His second book, Cronies: Oil, the Bushes, and the Rise of Texas, America’s Superstate, was published in 2004. Bryce has appeared on numerous TV and radio programs ranging from the BBC and CNN to PBS and NPR. His latest book is Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of "Energy Independence."]

Copyright © 2008 The Austin American-Statesman

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