Randall Woods: Which of the JFK/LBJ Domestic Programs Do Conservatives Wish Had Never Seen the Light of Day?
Last week the conservative political cartoonist, Michael Ramirez, ran a two panel caricature of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson respectively. Under the JFK rendering was the inscription “Obama’s rhetoric” and under LBJ’s “Obama’s policies.” Given Ramirez’ political leanings, I gather this was meant as an indictment.
I wonder which of the Kennedy-Johnson programs conservatives wished had not seen the light of day: Medicare and Medicaid, federal aid to education, Head Start, public television and radio, the Civil Rights Acts of 1963, 1964, and 1968, the first real clean air and water legislation, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Food Stamp Act, the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act, the Automobile Safety Act, and/or the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities? They probably would have objected to Johnson’s plan in 1968 to admit that the United States and its president had erred in its massive troop buildup in Vietnam and then turn the war over to the Vietnamese, but you can’t have everything. The Great Society was as important to the America’s middle class as to its working class. The combination of Medicare and the Higher Education Act of 1965 relieved families of having to choose between caring for their aging parents and sending their children to college. And until Vietnam began inflating defense spending, all of this on a balanced budget. Obama and the Democratic party could do worse. It is time for Democrats to reclaim their heritage.
Johnson did not like the term “liberal” – “they want to control your mind,” he confided to a lieutenant; he preferred the terms left, right, and center with himself situated at the center left. One thing he would have agreed with Robert Taft on is that the policies of the current administration are neither conservative or liberal; left, right, or center; they defy definition, seeming to reside outside history itself.
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