I would love for to Barack Obama to hit various notes in his speech this evening.
I'd love for him to use a minute or so of his time in the spotlight to update New Orleans and environs about the protections for Gustav -- and to tell them that when he is President, FEMA will be returned to its level of competency under President Clinton.
I'd love for him to anticipate and take the sting out of the Republican attacks coming next week.
But there's one thing that you haven't been hearing about that he really should do:
Mark the 100th anniversary yesterday of the birth of President Lyndon Baines Johnson.
(1) Our Party
Please take a couple of minutes, if you're willing, to read Robert Caro's guest column today in the New York Times: Johnson’s Dream, Obama’s Speech. It's a reminder of how the events of this week mark a culmination not only of Black activism driving the struggle for civil rights, but of the white Democratic political establishment doing what was necessary to make it happen. As Caro reminds us, none of this would likely be happening without the enactment of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 -- and that event was no sure thing.
That was our party's achievement.
A Republican reading this would no doubt point out that the VRA -- like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and later ones -- passed with Republican support. And so they did. The greatest impediments to the enactment of civil rights and voting rights legislation were Democratic committee chairs in both houses of Congress.
And yet they were not of our party.
They were, using the term that Strom Thurmond adopted in his Presidential campaign in 1948, "Dixiecrats." We now know them as "Republicans." Some, like Theodore Bilbo, James Eastland, and John Stennis, left Congress too early to convert. Others, like Jesse Helms, Trent Lott, and "boll weevils" like Phil Gramm, began their political careers as Democrats and then switched. The ideological DNA of such people does not run through the veins of our party, but through that of our opponents.
Our party is the one that Carol wrote about in his piece today.
(2) LBJ and his legacy
LBJ's centenary has been largely ignored in DKos, just as it has elsewhere. Some exceptions include Today is Lyndon B. Johnson's Birthday by Mutual Assured Destruction, LBJ's Contrubution to This Nomination Must be Acknowledged by RFK Lives, and a few other efforts on the "Great Society" by Jeffrey Feldman, the 1964 Civil Rights Act by Snout, and this by YoursTruly.
Robert Caro, LBJ's biographer, sets the story for us in his column today:
When, on the night of March 15, 1965, the long motorcade drove away from the White House, heading for Capitol Hill, where President Johnson would give his speech to a joint session of Congress, pickets were standing outside the gates, as they had been for weeks, and as the presidential limousine passed, they were singing the same song that was being sung that week in Selma, Ala.: "We Shall Overcome." They were singing it in defiance of Johnson, because they didn’t trust him.
They had reasons not to trust him.
In March 1965, black Americans in the 11 Southern states were still largely unable to vote. When they tried to register, they faced not only questions impossible to answer — like the infamous "how many bubbles in a bar of soap?" — but also the humiliation of trying to answer them in front of registrars who didn’t bother to conceal their scorn. Out of six million blacks old enough to vote in those 11 states in 1965, only a small percentage — 27 percent in Georgia, 19 percent in Alabama, 6 percent in Mississippi — were registered.
What’s more, those who were registered faced not only beatings and worse but economic retaliation as well if they tried to actually cast a ballot. Black men who registered might be told by their employer that they no longer had a job; black farmers who went to the bank to renew their annual "crop loan" were turned down, and lost their farms. Some, as I have written, "had to load their wives and children into their rundown cars and drive away, sometimes with no place to go." So the number of black men and women in the South who actually cast a vote was far smaller than the number registered; in no way were black Americans realizing their political potential.
That's all fair use allows me to quote of Caro -- read the whole column to see many of the best parts -- but I can quote directly from the speech JFK gave announcing the drive to the Voting Rights Act:
"Even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome."
Caro notes that, when Johnson left the speech, the protesters were gone. He notes that, in Selma, Martin Luther King Jr.'s aides, for the first time in their time together, saw him cry.
Without the Voting Rights Act, Virginia would not be in play. Nor would North Carolina. Hell, neither, in all likelihood would Nevada and New Mexico -- perhaps not even Florida or Ohio. The strengthening of the Voting Rights Act that will occur under President Obama is what we hope will at long last allow all eligible Americans to be heard. After that, let the chips fall where they may: few of us doubt our ability to win a fair fight.
(3) Our ambivalence then -- and now
With such a record, why isn't the 100th anniversary of the birth of JFK a moment of national celebration (as, you know, Reagan's centenary will be)? Our ambivalence towards LBJ as a party largely has to do with his early support for, and later inability to extract himself and the nation from, a misguided, bloody, expensive, and catastrophic war. His belief that political reality demanded that he not withdraw from Vietnam was, to be sure, unforgivable; on the other hand, it is not ours to forgive or not to forgive. He didn't trust the American people to understand our not continuing even a futile fight; he didn't think that the party could overcome Republicans capitalizing on such a policy. So disaster followed.
This should sound familiar. Our party has been riven by those who, out of fear of electoral reprisal -- well-founded fear of Republican attacks that we see even to today -- voted to authorized a war and those who stood against it. Faced with an unprincipled opposition, a derisive media, and an inattentive electorate, opposing the war took immense guts. And yet those who did and did not remain, sometimes uncomfortably, part of our party, and at least we can say that most of those who once supported the war now want to make amends. That's worth something.
We are not the party that taunts and flexes before voters to gain political advantage by provoking a stupid war. We are the party that can sometimes be dragged into it against our better judgment. Our party can sometimes be unadmirable. We may not excuse that, but we should recognize that there is a moral gulf between being unable to bring oneself to repel evil and being actively evil.
LBJ wanted to stop a war forty years ago and couldn't bring himself to do it. Obama will stop a war next year. He'll have a party united behind him to do it. If he loses, it won't happen.
(4) LBJ and MLK
If Barack Obama chose to do so, he could structure his entire speech tonight around the three of three anniversaries that overlap the last three days of this year's Convention: the enactment of the Amendment giving women the right to vote, the birth of LBJ, and King's "I have a dream" speech. (He could of courst also mention the one that falls tomorrow: Katrina's landfall.) Of these, we've heard about yesterday's anniversary the least. Yet Barack Obama -- the practical politician -- is as much the descendant of Lyndon Johnson as he is of Martin Luther King Jr.
LBJ had to make compromises in the beginning of his political career -- even opposing anti-lynching legislation! -- to become the rising star among the Dixiecrats, become the focus of their power, and be put in a position ultimately -- and gleefully -- to betray them rather than to betray the Constitution. He was, metaphorically and literally, in a continual dialogue with MLK, who was pushing him to reach further, stand stronger, push harder. Between them, they -- Our Party -- accomplished something great. Without them, Barack Obama could have never become this year's nominee.
I hope that he thanks them both, recognizes them both, and brings those who follow both of their traditions -- along with the majority of the Americans who are prepared to do so -- into Our Party's embrace.