There was a lot of talk back in January when President Barack Obama took over that he was likely to follow in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s footsteps. The times, many argued, demaned bold vision and a rebirth of New Deal liberalism, and Obama’s combination of smarts, charisma, eloquence and popularity would allow him to be aggressive in fixing our national problems.
Perhaps, we were foolish to expect so much. Not only do we live in different times, Obama is not FDR. And, perhaps more importantly, it is not FDR’s presidency that Obama should study, but that of Lyndon Baines Johnson.
I’ve written before about Johnson’s style — his willingness to twist arms and break skulls helped push through some of the more important, but unpopular initiatives (civil rights, fair housing and immigration legislation, Medicare and other parts of the Great Society) of the last century.
That stands in stark contrast to Obama, who fancies himself a bipartisan great conciliator. The problem with his approach, of course, is that bipartisanship cannot be an end unto itself. It is only useful when tied to a specific legislative target. Unfortunately, what we have seen so far from the Obama presidency has been a willingness to compromise away important pieces of the progressive agenda; on health care, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” climate change, the stimulus — he’s allowed a small number of Republicans and conservative Democrats to rein in his agenda.
It is not only on domestic policy that the president could learn from LBJ, however. Obama needs to reread his history of the era — in particular, David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, which recounts the slow and deadly descent into quagmire in Vietnam. To Johnson, Vietnam was the line in the sand over which the communists could not be allowed to cross and he was willing to bet everything to keep them from crossing.
The result, of course, was more than 50,000 dead American soldiers, a badly damaged international reputation, division at home and– most importantly, for the purposes of this argument — the gutting of his own ambitious domestic agenda, especially his “war on poverty.”
The war not only sapped the budget, but it angered a portion of what should have been his base — the antiwar left — at a time when working class whites were beginning their flight from the party, angry over accommodations being made to African Americans. It was the beginning of a long era of insignificance for the Democratic Party, which lost five of the next six presidential elections (the sixth, the Carter win, was in many ways an anamoly caused by the Watergate scandal).
Fastfoward to the Obama presidency, which is a little more than seven months old. Obama’s commitment to the war in Afghanistan, as The Nation points out in an editorial in its Sept. 14 issue ($), will have a delitirious impact on the rest of what he wants to do. And Americans are starting to understand this.
(A) majority is increasingly aware that the more blood and treasure we pour down the Afghan drain, the less we’ll have to spend on economic recovery, healthcare reform and building a green economy at home.
If we want to avoid this, if we want to “protect Obama’s reform agenda,” we have to “seek alternatives to a militarized strategy in Afghanistan” that must include a timeline for withdrawal (as proposed by Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wisc., and U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass.) and a focus on diplomacy, targeted policing and an international commitment of money and other resources needed to rebuild the country.
Think about this: We are eight years into this war and we’ve just witnessed its bloodiest month. The national government is connected by a thread, with voter fraud being alleged and chaos outside the main cities. And al-Qaida has shown that it can get to high-level Afghan officials. And we’ve been relying to a disconterting degree on contractors and public support for the war is falling.
And yet, there are signals being sent that indicate we’ll be increasing our troop presence, rather than cutting it back.
Parallels with other moments in history are difficult and generally specious. Afghanistan is not Vietnam and Obama is not LBJ. But the history of LBJ adminstration and the Vietnam war does have relevance to our current moment. President Obama ignores it at his — and the nation’s — peril.
Hank Kalet 