Title: The power of Lyndon Johnson is a myth - The Washington Post
Headings: The power of Lyndon Johnson is a myth
The power of Lyndon Johnson is a myth
Content: Yet even this critical portrayal depicts LBJ as all-powerful. Rather than exploring why Johnson feared sending a bill to Congress, we see a president who is singularly making the decision to hold back legislation. If only Johnson had said yes, the rest would have been smooth sailing. This is what an imaginary world without Congress looks like. Advertisement
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For those longing for another tough Texan, there isn’t much optimism that we will see this from President Obama. “ Obama is the anti-Lyndon Johnson,” Maureen Dowd wrote. Yet the argument that Obama would be more effective if he acted like Johnson is premised on a powerful myth about Johnson—and, more importantly, a myth about what a president can do with a broken political environment. The truth is that all the political savvy in the world has rarely been enough to move a Congress when the legislators who controlled it fundamentally opposed the White House’s proposals. The veneration of Johnson’s “treatment,” those moments when LBJ invaded the personal space of legislators to bully and seduce them, does more to obscure than illuminate how politics really works; the myth about LBJ over-emphasizes the capacity of “great men” to affect legislation by force of personality and undervalues the centrality of the political system in which a president must operate.