Stephen Pizzo: Will Obama be Like Lyndon B. Johnson?
[Stephen Pizzo has been published everywhere from The New York Times to Mother Jones magazine. His book, Inside Job: The Looting of America's Savings and Loans, was nominated for a Pulitzer.]
On July 2, 1964 a southerner, President Lyndon B. Johnson, signed the Civil Rights Act into law.
Here was a white southerner, a guy who just weeks before signing this law complained to an aide in a perplexed Texas drawl, "Goddamnit. I just learnt to say negra and now they want to be called black?" (One need not to ask what he called African Americans before he learned to say "negra" instead.)
But he supported the Act, and he signed it into law, ending two centuries of American apartheid. And he did so at the greatest of all political risks:
"President Johnson realized that supporting this bill would risk losing the South's overwhelming support of the Democratic Party. Johnson told Robert Kennedy aide Ted Sorensen; "I know the risks are great, and we might lose the South, but those sorts of states may be lost anyway." Senator Richard Russell, Jr. warned President Johnson that his strong support for the civil rights bill "will not only cost you the South, it will cost you the election." The South indeed started to vote increasingly Republican after 1964." (More)
And so it came to pass. The Dems did indeed lose the South -- and what of the South they held was only held by putting up for office closet Republicans masquerading as Democrats (AKA "Blue Dog Democrats.")
Over the decades that followed Johnson's personal profile in courage, Republicans gained ground. As the South went red it laid the foundation for Newt Gingrich Republican revolution. From that switch from blue to red flowed many awful things; Ronald Reagan, George H. Bush, George W. Bush, a conservative-leaning federal judiciary, the near-total destruction of America's once robust industrial base, the knee-capping of the American middle class, an illegal war, torture, financial collapse, and more.
So, did Lyndon Johnson really do the right thing?
Of course he did the right thing. Doing the right thing often means doing the hard thing... which is why doing the right thing is always such a rare and notable in event Washington. After all, if doing the right thing were risk-free and easy, they'd do it more often. Not always, of course, because there's those contributors they have tend to, but more often...
Read entire article at OpEdNews.com
On July 2, 1964 a southerner, President Lyndon B. Johnson, signed the Civil Rights Act into law.
Here was a white southerner, a guy who just weeks before signing this law complained to an aide in a perplexed Texas drawl, "Goddamnit. I just learnt to say negra and now they want to be called black?" (One need not to ask what he called African Americans before he learned to say "negra" instead.)
But he supported the Act, and he signed it into law, ending two centuries of American apartheid. And he did so at the greatest of all political risks:
"President Johnson realized that supporting this bill would risk losing the South's overwhelming support of the Democratic Party. Johnson told Robert Kennedy aide Ted Sorensen; "I know the risks are great, and we might lose the South, but those sorts of states may be lost anyway." Senator Richard Russell, Jr. warned President Johnson that his strong support for the civil rights bill "will not only cost you the South, it will cost you the election." The South indeed started to vote increasingly Republican after 1964." (More)
And so it came to pass. The Dems did indeed lose the South -- and what of the South they held was only held by putting up for office closet Republicans masquerading as Democrats (AKA "Blue Dog Democrats.")
Over the decades that followed Johnson's personal profile in courage, Republicans gained ground. As the South went red it laid the foundation for Newt Gingrich Republican revolution. From that switch from blue to red flowed many awful things; Ronald Reagan, George H. Bush, George W. Bush, a conservative-leaning federal judiciary, the near-total destruction of America's once robust industrial base, the knee-capping of the American middle class, an illegal war, torture, financial collapse, and more.
So, did Lyndon Johnson really do the right thing?
Of course he did the right thing. Doing the right thing often means doing the hard thing... which is why doing the right thing is always such a rare and notable in event Washington. After all, if doing the right thing were risk-free and easy, they'd do it more often. Not always, of course, because there's those contributors they have tend to, but more often...