WSJ: What LBJ Did for the New Deal, W Is Doing for the Reagan Revolution

Brendan Miniter, in the WSJ (Nov. 9, 2004):

[Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com.]

With a historic electoral victory at his back, George W. Bush is now being compared to some pretty consequential presidents. Lincoln and FDR--as war presidents--immediately come to mind. But there is another, more obvious, comparison that strikes to the heart of why the left hates this president with such intensity. GWB may be the Republican LBJ.

This isn't meant with any disrespect to Mr. Bush. Nor are the two simply comparable because they both came from Texas, came to power after each man's party prevailed in a narrow electoral victory (LBJ served out the term John F. Kennedy barely won over Richard Nixon in 1960) or because both were faced with a protracted war abroad while their party controlled both houses of Congress.

The two presidents are comparable for the place they share in their respective political movements. Today we cannot be sure what place JFK would have in history had he lived. But we do know that upon assuming the presidency and then later launching his Great Society welfare programs, LBJ delivered a second wave of liberal ideas that propelled the progressive movement well into the 1970s--which isn't bad for a political philosophy based on the faulty economic assumptions that high taxes, price controls and expensive government handouts could deliver a booming economy. Without LBJ, it is conceivable that FDR's New Deal ideas of the 1930s and '40s would have run out of steam in the 1960s--continuing to roll on through Social Security and other established programs, but no longer pushing forward public policy prescriptions for new and emerging problems.

Today President Bush represents a similar second wave of fresh ideas for a political movement that came of age a generation before he became president: the Reagan revolution. President Bush has revived the Reagan-era ideas of cutting marginal income tax rates and strengthening national defense. Missile defense lives on, and "pre-emption" is a logical outgrowth of the policies Reagan laid out in confronting the Soviets.

But Mr. Bush isn't running a retro-presidency. Many of his ideas are new and every bit as bold in what they aim to achieve as those LBJ promulgated--although they will likely prove to be more successful and longer lived. If the war in Iraq succeeds, Mr. Bush will have done for the Middle East what the Johnson and Nixon administrations failed to do for Southeast Asia ....

GWB and LBJ are comparable for another reason too. Both came to power after the opposing party controlled the White House for two relatively inconsequential terms. Dwight D. Eisenhower reached a cease-fire in the Korean War, appointed judges who would support civil rights, and sent in the National Guard to desegregate schools in the South. But he did not even try to repeal the New Deal. By leaving the welfare state in place, Ike legitimized it--leaving LBJ free to expand it in the following decade.
In the 1990s, Bill Clinton served a similar role vis-à-vis the Reagan revolution. In his first two years in office, Mr. Clinton raised taxes and tried (but failed) to institute a radical socialization of medicine. He then spent the next six years "triangulating"--co-opting Republican ideas by signing welfare reform and balancing the budget. In the end, the Clinton presidency ended up ratifying the Reagan revolution in ways the first Bush presidency, hobbled by a Democratic Congress, never could.

All of this adds up to an opportunity for President Bush. If he goes down in history as a significant and consequential president it will probably be because he played a role similar to that of LBJ: giving a second blast of energy to a political movement and therefore hurling it well into the next decade or more.