Posted on 03/10/2009 5:22:10 AM PDT by kellynla
It was the winter of conservative discontent.
Barry Goldwater had gotten only 38 percent of the vote, and his party had suffered its worst thrashing since Alf Landon fell to FDR in 1936.
Democrats held 295 House seats, Republicans 140. They held 68 Senate seats to Republicans' 32, and 33 governors to the GOP's 17.
Democratic registration was twice that of the GOP. The liberal press was gleefully writing the obituary of "The Party That Lost Its Head."
Decades might pass, it was said, before the GOP recovered from its fatal embrace of right-wing radicalism and foolish rejection of the leadership of Govs. Nelson Rockefeller and William Scranton.
Wrote Robert Donovan in the opening lines of his book, "The Future of the Republican Party":
"The devastating defeat of Barry Goldwater at the hands of voters in all sections of the country but the Deep South has damaged, weakened and tarnished the party. For years to come ... the two-party system will be crippled."
Donovan and all the rest were wrong. The GOP came roaring back in 1966 to capture 47 House seats and eight new governorships. In 1968, Nixon led the party out of the wilderness and into a White House it would hold for 20 of the next 24 years.
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.
By 1968, racial riots had torn apart almost every great city. The most prestigious campuses had been rocked by student violence. Thousands of antiwar demonstrators had taken to the streets. And 100 to 200 body bags were coming home from Vietnam every week.
By the winter of 1968, Lyndon Johnson was a broken president.
History never repeats itself exactly. But Barack Obama is making the same mistakes today that LBJ made in 1965.
He has ordered 17,000 more U.S. troops into Afghanistan, as the situation deteriorates and the NATO allies pull out. He has no exit strategy. He has read a repudiation of George Bush as a mandate for a government seizure of wealth and power that exceeds anything attempted in the Great Society.
Fully half of the $3.55 trillion in spending Obama will preside over this year will not be covered by tax revenue but by red ink. The money will have to be borrowed from abroad or printed by the Fed.
Not only is Barack running a deficit four times as large as Bush's largest, he has called for $1 trillion in new taxes on America's most successful, who have already seen their savings and pensions ravaged.
He wants a cap-and-trade system to deal with a global-warming or climate-change crisis many scientists believe is a hoax. He is going to provide health care for all, including immigrants, millions of whom arrive uninsured every year.
He is going to plunge scores of billions more into education, though education has eaten up the wealth of an empire, as SAT scores sink further and further below the apogee of 1964, before LBJ and the feds barged in. He is going to ask Congress for authority to spend another $750 billion rescuing the banks.
He is going to find the cure for cancer. He is going to ensure every kid gets a college education. He is going to drop half of all wage-earners off the tax rolls, while the top 2 percent, who already pay 40 percent of all income taxes, are forced to cough up more.
Obama is misreading the election returns. When America voted to cancel the White House lease of Mr. Bush, it did not vote Barack Obama a blank check.
By misinterpreting his mandate, Obama has accomplished something John McCain could not -- unite the Republican Party and instill in it a new esprit de corps. For the Obama budget is an insult to the core belief of the party -- that free people, not coercive government, should shape the character of society.
By daring Republicans to fight on the issue of a $1.75 trillion deficit, Obama has liberated the GOP from any obligation to him. He has come out of the closet as a radical liberal spoiling for a fight over an agenda of radical change.
Sooner than any might have thought, we have clarity.
Rather Vladimir Illych Obama, not Lyndon Baines Obama.
Pat nails it.
I don’t always agree with Pat, but he always makes a good, if not politically-correct, argument.
Good one.
True.
After all, a dead clock is right twice a day - Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn. Fill in your own analogy here_______________________.
Trust me on this: Pat Nails the Vietnam angle.
It will be Afghanistan that will be Barack’s undoing. His willingness to negotiate with the “good Taliban” has the jihadis smelling blood and the Iranians snickering. There’s a reason for the uptick in bombings in Iraq, for example.
He will only arouse the passion of the antiwar left that didn’t know it was getting war in Afghanistan. His unwillingness to tackle the issue of the Frontier States leaves Al Qaeda a sanctuary, just as the NVA had Cambodia as a sanctuary in the late 1960’s.
History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy-the second time as farce.
Best,
Chris
Well, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste
Pat speaks with authority here. He was right in the big middle of it all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Buchanan
St. Louis Globe-Democrat Editorial Writer
Buchanan joined the St. Louis Globe-Democrat at age 23. The first year of the United States embargo against Cuba in 1961, Canada-Cuba trade tripled. The Globe-Democrat published a rewrite of Buchanan’s Columbia master’s project under the eight-column banner “Canada sells to Red Cuba - And Prospers” eight weeks after Buchanan started at the paper. According to Buchanan’s memoir Right from the Beginning, this article was a career milestone. However, Buchanan later said the embargo strengthened the communist regime and he turned against it.[8] Buchanan was promoted to assistant editorial page editor in 1964 and supported Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. However, the Globe-Democrat did not endorse Goldwater and Buchanan speculated there was a clandestine agreement between the paper and President Johnson. Buchanan recalled: “The conservative movement has always advanced from its defeats. . . I can’t think of a single conservative who was sorry about the Goldwater campaign.”[6] According to the foreword (written by Pat Buchanan) in the most recent edition of Conscience of a Conservative, Buchanan was a member of the Young Americans for Freedom, and wrote press releases for that organization. He served as an executive assistant in the Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie, Alexander, and Mitchell law offices in New York City in 1965.
[edit] Work for the Nixon White House
The next year, he was the first adviser hired to Nixon’s presidential campaign;[9] he worked primarily as an opposition researcher. For his speeches aimed at dedicated supporters, he was soon nicknamed “Mr. Inside.” [10]
Buchanan traveled with Nixon throughout the campaigns of 1966 and 1968
Republican politicians are wimps.
Even a nerd gets lucky sometime.
They are so set on 'following the rules' that they don't realize the other side HAS no rules.
They know. They just don’t want to fight.
“Pat nails it.”
Agreed, except for one thing. Yes, the pieces are beginning to fall into place for a Republican re-emergence, and though there is not one yet, I have no doubt that a leader will emerge by late 2010 - but the rules of the game are changing.
Under our normal free election system, we could expect gains in 2010 and more in ‘12, even if not a majority. Under these circumstances however, we may not be looking at an even electoral playing field.
Witness: Hundreds of millions to a voter-fraud group like ACORN.
Witness: The White House (read that as Rahmbo) taking over the census.
And I don’t think we have seen the last of assaults on the Electoral College, either.
All this points to a battle to regain control that is more uphill than any in our country’s history, imo.
Pat is off base about Republicans being united. The party is still confused and leaderless.
Great article by Buchanan, but the title is wrong. If any president in recent years bears a striking resemblance to Lyndon Baines Johnson, it was George W. Bush. The “guns and butter” approach of the 2001-08 period is one of the major factors in our current unraveling economy.
Obama - Our first shuck and jive president.
Al
So what should Bush have done, “Guns or Butter?”
The party doesn’t need a leader right now, it just needs to coalesce around its core philosophy. The party’s leader, in the form of a figurehead, an individual, will emerge later on in the election cycle, imho.
Why would we want to shoot ourselves in the foot by lamenting a lack of “leadership?” The current Administration is shooting itself in its feet on a daily basis - let’s focus on that and send a clear message of “big government doesn’t work!” everytime we open our mouths.
Keep the focus on THEM, not our supposed lack of leadership. If we concentrate on their failed, radical and dangerous policies we’ll do fine, and a leader will emerge naturally - the way all leaders must emerge. Let’s not take out eye off the ball at this early date, when our opponents are giving us so much to unite AGAINST.
I also believe that we cannot and should not waste time APPOINTING a leader, like Palin or Jindal. We will only wind up getting into intra-party tiffs that will dilute our focus. A leader will emerge and all but a few die-hards will unite behind that leader. Now is the time to let things happen naturally, and vote more R’s into Congress and local offices in the mid-term.
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