President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965 while Martin Luther King and others look o
As I was driving to my local Hillary for America office for my work shift today I was listening to The Kojo Nnamdi Show on NPR. A young woman on the show stated that she probably would vote for a third party candidate even though she knew that a vote for someone else was, in effect, a vote for Trump. She just didn’t completely agree, she said, with any of the candidates.
This diary is addressed to the woman on my radio.
I have never, not once in the 44 years I have been voting, completely agreed with any candidate. Maybe the closest I came was my first vote, for George McGovern. I think the only candidacy whose agenda I could support completely would be my own, and I would make a terrible president. The idea isn’t to vote for and elect someone who will give us everything we want in the next 4 years. The idea is to vote for and elect the person who will be able to make the most progress toward what we want. And the person who may be able to achieve the most progressive progress may not be the one with the most progressive agenda.
An exemplar of this is Lyndon Baines Johnson. A Texas Democrat with a reputation for being a wheeler dealer willing to lean on legislators, twist arms, and make questionable deals to get what he wanted. In fact, the 1964 election has many parallels with 2016. Nevertheless, LBJ accomplished more progressive policies than any other President in the second half of the twentieth century.
Domestic accomplishments of President Johnson:
- Designed his signature "Great Society" legislation, which included laws upholding civil rights, public broadcasting, Medicare, Medicaid, environmental protection, aid to education, and the abolition of poverty
- Signed the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 outlawing most forms of racial segregation and providing equal housing opportunities regardless of race, creed, or national origin, and passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawing discrimination in voting
- Appointed Thurgood Marshall as the first African American justice on the Supreme Court
- Signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and Higher Education Act to improve funding to schools, especially those in poor districts
- Established the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts to support humanists and artists
- Created programs to tackle poverty such as Head Start, food stamps, Work Study, Medicare, and Medicaid
- Presided over the first manned flight to the Moon with the Apollo 8 program
Foreign policy accomplishments of President Johnson:
- Signed the Immigration Act of 1965, which substantially liberalized US immigration policy towards non-Europeans
LBJ worked for immigration reform, open housing, environmental protection, and expanded Social Security, and implemented the Freedom of Information Act.
If you clicked the above link, you will notice i didn’t include his last “accomplishment,”
Foreign policy accomplishments of President Johnson:
- Drastically escalated American involvement in Vietnam following the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution from 16,000 advisors/soldiers to 550,000 combat troops in 1968
That’s because the expansion of the war in Viet Nam was one of the worst foreign policy disasters prior to George W Bush’s war in Iraq. Richard Nixon blocked an incipient peace process in order to win the 1968 election, and went on to make the war much worse and more deadly. Nevertheless, LBJ drastically expanded the war. That’s on him.
There is no question; LBJ had feet of clay. And he wasn’t particularly likable. He was course and ham-handed. His agenda in 1964 was standard Democratic fare, not nearly as progressive as George McGovern’s in 1972. But by God, he got so much done!
I will take a candidate who may have an incremental, but achievable. agenda over my “ideal” candidate any day. I’m not voting for my best friend, I’m not voting for a purity pony, I’m voting for someone who knows how to get things done. In this election that is Hillary Clinton.
That’s why I’m with her.
