I often disagree with Pat Buchanan, but this analysis, “Lyndon Baines Obama,” is mostly right.
Full of hubris in 1965, Lyndon Johnson had seized his moment. He had
launched a Great Society that would outdo his beloved patron FDR. He
would dispatch 500,000 troops to Vietnam to “bring the coonskin home on
the wall” and create a “Great Society on the Mekong.” Those were heady
days of “guns-and-butter.”By 1968, LBJ’s coalition was shredded. Gov. George Wallace had torn away the populist right. Sens. Gene McCarthy, George McGovern and
Robert Kennedy had rallied the antiwar left against him. LBJ and Hubert
Humphrey were left to preside over a shrinking center.Why did LBJ fail? He overloaded the circuits. He tried to do it all.
He misread a national desire for continuity after Kennedy’s death as a
mandate for a lunge to the left and a great leap forward with the
largest expansion of government since the New Deal.
Pat fails to mention that Republican control the White House for 20 of the 24 years after 1968, did not reverse the Great Society or the New Deal. The 2008 landslide win by the left is producing another expansion of government and this might be the final twist of the ratchet . Even if Republicans win in 2010 and 2012, it is unlikely that they will reverse Obama’s gains. Republicans seem eternally fated to play defense.
