Edward Luce: Unlike LBJ, Obama Battles Frozen Politics
Edward Luce is the Washington columnist and commentator for the Financial Times.
If ever a study in presidential contrasts caught the imagination, it is the one between Lyndon Baines Johnson and Barack Obama. “That man [LBJ] will twist your arm off at the shoulder and beat your head in with it,” Richard Russell, the Georgia senator and Johnson’s mentor, once said. Basketball aside, it is impossible to imagine Mr Obama in such physical terms. For him, politics is not a contact sport.
Every age makes history relevant to itself. In the past six weeks, Robert Caro’s fourth biographical volume on LBJ, The Passage of Power, has animated Washington with tales of a very different kind of president. It has conjured visions of an era when big men got things done. “He [LBJ] knew just how to get to you, and he was relentless in doing it,” wrote Bill Clinton in a New York Times review. LBJ was better at reading people than books. One contemporary said he was “the greatest salesman one-on-one who ever lived”. Needless to say, Mr Obama prefers a ratio of one to several thousand. Little surprise he presides over a gridlocked Washington.
Thus has conventional wisdom taken root. Yet the view that the logjam in today’s Washington could have been broken by a more hands-on president is largely an illusion. The difference between the 1960s and today is that the US parties have polarised. Under America’s separation of powers, parliamentary-style discipline will bring the system to a halt. To most of us, human drama is much more gripping than congressional voting patterns. Yet even when biography offers the truth, it is not the whole truth...