When presidential leadership cared - President Johnson: A Rick Holmes essay

Thank God (and I mean that prayerfully, in thanks!) there are essayists like Rick Holmes, an opinion columnist published in the Arkansas Time Record newspaper! "On the Road", reminding readers about the humanitarian legacy of presidential leadership, in this opinion column:  

President Lyndon Johnson (1908-1973) was determined to make a difference.

President Lyndon Johnson 

"When it comes to rural poverty, neither party has a plan', Rick Holmes in the Arkansas Times Record.

Johnson City, Texas – It’s no coincidence that the offices of the Pedernales Electric Cooperative sit just across the street from Lyndon Johnson’s boyhood home.

In the 1930s, the Texas Hill Country was like most of rural America: Isolated, dusty and poor, with few jobs and limited prospects, losing its brightest young people to the growing cities. Those left behind still lived pretty much like they had in the 19th century. They didn’t even have electricity, because it cost too much to string wires to houses spread so far apart.

Young Lyndon Johnson ran for Congress in 1937 on a promise to bring power to the Hill Country. He had an ally in President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose Rural Electrification Administration – one of dozens of New Deal agencies trying to improve the lives of struggling families – provided start-up loans to customer-owned electric cooperatives. Once elected, Johnson got the federal loan and went farm-to-farm talking people into joining the cooperative. Soon enough, folks in the Hill Country had refrigerators, radios and the opportunities that come with being part of the wired world.

Johnson knew the lives of the rural poor. He taught school in Cotulla, Texas, where his students, nearly all Mexican-Americans, were trapped by poverty and discrimination. He saw the toll taken by underfunded schools and unavailable health care.

A passionate New Dealer, Johnson believed the government could make life better for people his father had described as “caught in the tentacles of circumstance.” In Congress, and especially after he became president on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Johnson delivered. The domestic agenda enacted under LBJ stands second only to FDR’s in shaping modern America: Medicare and Medicaid to help the sick; food stamps to feed the hungry; Head Start, federal education aid and Work Study to help close the education gap. 

No president since has come close to President Johnson's domestic legacy.

President Johnson called it the War on Poverty, a term conservative critics ridiculed after he left office, declaring it was a war poverty had won. It was a bad metaphor – war metaphors usually are – because it takes constant effort to minimize poverty, and there’s no final victory. But while he was in office, the percentage of Americans living below the poverty line fell from 23 percent to 12 percent, no mean accomplishment. Johnson cut poverty in half, and if Vietnam had not derailed his presidency, he likely would have cut it more.

“I hope it may be said, a hundred years from now, that by working together we helped make our country more just, more just for all its people, as well as insure and guarantee the blessings of liberty for all of our posterity,” Johnson said as his presidency drew to a close. “That is what I hope.

“But I believe that at least it will be said that we tried.”

In my travels across America over the past year, I’ve seen a lot of places where the main commerce seems to be dollar stores, pawn shops, payday lenders and disability claims. Further from the interstates there are no signs of economic life at all.

Rural America is hurting today, at least as much as back in the 1930s. Jobs have been lost to trade and mechanization. Family farms have been lost to corporatization. Rural America is steadily losing population, as bright and ambitious young people flee to cities and suburbs. Those left behind are isolated from the global economy, dependent on government benefit programs and increasingly addicted to opioids.

Persistent poverty, passed down from generation to generation, comes in all colors: white in the hollers of Appalachia, black in the Mississippi Delta, brown in the Rio Grande Valley, red on the Indian reservations of the west. As in the ’30s, discrimination strengthens poverty’s grip.

The difference is that today, nobody in Washington is fighting to get high-speed Internet into rural towns like LBJ fought to bring electricity to the Hill Country. There’s no national plan to break the opioid epidemic or revive communities on the brink of becoming ghost towns. Rural voters are fed culture wars rhetoric by Republicans and mostly ignored by Democrats. 

When it comes to rural poverty, neither party has a plan.

There are no easy answers. Some of President Johnson's War on Poverty programs came up empty. But, at least he and Congress made the effort. What deepens the desperation of the nation’s rural poor today is that Washington doesn’t even seem to be trying.

Republican campaign 2016 strategy has miserably failed

"...one Republican said, (Cruz) seems “‘covered in a thick layer of people repellent.’”


It looks increasingly like the GOP convention in Cleveland Ohio will be a failed event.

It's difficult to understand how the Republicans strategy for the 2016 presidential campaign could have forseen the implosion now consuming the party. I have no insider information, but common sense tells me the strategy to win the White House is doomed. Evidently, the plan was to annoint Jeb Bush to be crowned "Bush III".  A few annoying competitors would be picked off because, frankly, nobody was going to give the others candidates enough money to compete against a Bush treasure chest. Just to make things look legitimate, the Republicans set up a series of southern state primaries to bolster the delegate vote to the magic number. 

All the political pomp and circumstance, if it had worked, would've inevitably led to the Cleveland Ohio Repubican convention in July, where a celebration would skyrocket the party into the White House. Taaaadaaaaa!  Obviously, this strategy has failed. Instead, as is reported in March 18th, "The Week", a biterly divided GOP is headed for a crack-up.

What happened

Donald Trump tightened his grip on the Republican nomination with a string of primary and caucus victories, giving him significant momentum going into crucial contests in Florida, Ohio, New York and beyond. The billionaire businessman swept to convincing victories in Michigan, Mississippi, and Hawaii, having won Louisiana and Kentucky. 

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz confirmed his status as Trump’s most formidable rival, winning contests in Idaho, Kansas, and Maine and finishing second in the other races. Marco Rubio—once the hope of the Republican establishment—dropped out. The Florida senator won in Puerto Rico, but finished third or fourth everywhere else. Republican leaders’ last hope for denying Trump the nomination is crushed. Therefore, the state Republican parties are creating their own rules to rob Trump of delegates he has won. The nomination looks increasingly like it will be decided in a contested convention.

Trump’s victories came despite a renewed effort by Republicans to block his nomination. Mitt Romney, the party’s 2012 presidential nominee, made an unprecedented attack on Trump as “a phony, a fraud,” and a failed businessman, urging voters to back the other candidates in order to deny Trump a delegate majority and force a brokered convention. Some senior Republicans called for traditional conservatives to run a third-party candidate, even if it results in a Democratic victory. In the 11th GOP debate last week, Trump caused even more despair among party leaders by boasting about the size of his genitals, in response to Rubio’s jibes about the billionaire’s supposedly small hands. “I guarantee you,” Trump said, “there’s no problem.”

What the editorials said

“Contrary to what you’ve heard, the Republican presidential race isn’t over,” said The Wall Street Journal. Trump’s low support among late-deciding voters indicates that the recent barrage of attack ads and criticism by party leaders is having an effect. In addition, the businessman “nearly always loses a hypothetical one-on-one matchup” with his rivals.

“For the first time in four decades, Republicans face the real possibility of a contested convention,” said National​Review.com. 

If Trump arrives in Cleveland just shy of the delegate majority he needs, his supporters will “cry foul” if he isn’t nominated. But the process is designed to produce the best candidate for the general election, and the party is free under the rules to choose someone else. It shouldn’t be Rubio, said the Tampa Bay Times. The smooth-talking senator has always been “more talk than action, more gimmick than substance,” and the campaign has revealed that he’s “not prepared to be president.” 

What the columnists said

The “stop-Trump movement” needs to face reality, said Jonathan Tobin in CommentaryMagazine.com. If Kasich dropa out to let Cruz go one-on-one with Trump, the evangelical Texas senator will struggle to win “in the big Northern states that have yet to vote.” Ultimately, nothing will persuade the 35 to 40 percent of voters who blindly support Trump to abandon their leader. That will probably be “enough to win him the nomination.”

Either way, the party of Lincoln and Reagan is “shattering,” said Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal. If anti-Trump forces somehow do deny him the nomination, “his supporters will bolt, which will break the party.” If, on the other hand, Trump is crowned the head of the GOP in Cleveland on an anti-immigrant, anti-free-trade platform, principled conservatives and big donors will be so disgusted they’ll leave the party. Even if Trump loses the general election, said Ross Douthat in NYTimes.com, his “nomination will stamp his demagoguery with the party’s imprimatur” and leave Trump as “the face of the GOP brand” for years. The GOP as we know it “does look fated for a crack-up.”

So “what are anti-Trump Republicans to do?” asked Michael Gerson in The Washington Post. Cruz is also intolerable to most of us, since he’s actually moved to the right of Trump on illegal immigration, and as one Republican said, he seems “‘covered in a thick layer of people repellent.’” That leaves one alternative: Support a center-right third-party candidate, who could preserve the “core message of the party” until Trump and his vile brand have faded away.

A contested convention is a more realistic option, said David Brooks in The New York Times. A brokered convention “would be bedlam for a few days, but a broadly acceptable new option might emerge.” This is “a moment for audacity,” not resignation, because the future of the Republican Party is at stake.
Maine Writer observes- The Republican party is imploding, as a result of a strategy that clearly backfired. Indeed, the adversarial Democrats could not have forseen such failure inflicted on the GOP from within its own ranks. Of course, this GOP crises creates an opportunity for Democrats. Once and for all, the progressive agneda launched in the War on Poverty and in support of humaniarian goals like universal health care, can advanc. Who can claim the electoral college map's 2012 color scheme? Only Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders can take advantage of this Republican fiasco. Although they each see themselves as the next President of the United States, only one can be elected. Yet, it's better than 50/50 odds our next leader of the free world will, God willing, be a Democrat.   

In other words, Republicans are wasting their money by supporting a candidate doomed to loose (like "Cruz to loose" or "Drumpf") and trying unsuccessfully to sustain a failed political party.