Those of us now in our mid-60s who cut our teeth in the 1960s ought to initiate a campaign to add Lyndon Johnson to Mt. Rushmore. No one casts a larger shadow over today's political environment.
Most of our generation - fixated on a bad war and our personal strategies to avoid military service - didn't think well of him when he was in the White House and few would have predicted the respect he's accorded today and the awe his legislative record has earned.
Johnson planted the seeds that resulted both in the election of a black President and the social programs that have made American society more comfortable and equitable. And Johnson's willingness to tolerate big deficits to simultaneously finance an unpopular war and popular social programs initiated a habit that still dogs us today.
Johnson's antipoverty efforts worked. Ronald Reagan was simply wrong when he said, "We lost the war on poverty." That was the war in the 1960s we won. Despite periods of economic stress, the poverty rate has never returned to the levels recorded when Johnson took office. And it
isn't likely to now.
Medicare instantly transformed America's senior population from the segment least likely to have health insurance to only group where coverage was nearly universal. Lives are longer as a result, though paying the bills is a growing challenge.
Washington took a larger role in assuring that America's children got a better education - from Head Start at the beginning to a massive expansion of higher education assistance that is largely responsible for doubling the percentage of high school seniors who now complete college.
Despite this history, Johnson won scant attention during the recent campaign where the former presidents of choice appeared to be Reagan, Truman, Clinton and Carter. It is hard to argue any of them had an equal impact. There was a blip when Sen. Clinton suggested that Johnson had played a role in winning minority rights that equaled that of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The reality is that King and Johnson complemented one another in a relationship stressed by expanding differences over the war. It is hard to imagine America overcoming its racial issues with only one of them.
It is possible that President Obama can play an equally transformative role. Politically, the South is in play. The economic crisis of the moment provides a challenge that may ultimately be viewed as an enormous opportunity to deal with issues previously deemed radioactive - like income disparity and deficit spending. He has the potential to assure that future historians credit him with accomplishments beyond breaking the color bar.
Wishing alone, though, won't achieve the dream. For members of my generation of either party, perhaps the best lesson is to reserve judgment as we acknowledge how widely our initial evaluation of Lyndon Johnson missed the mark.
It was no accident that Barack Obama celebrated his victory in Chicago's Grant Park, the very site where our generation dramatically declared its distrust of Johnson during the 1968 Democratic convention or that a Chicago Mayor Daley was a key supporter of both men. Obama's handling of current wars is a delicate task that could explode into similar distrust.
Johnson's policies laid the groundwork of both the McCain and Obama candidacies--sponsoring the Vietnam conflict painfully made the former a war hero while enacting civil rights legislation that created a political environment friendly to the latter.
Each of these competing priorities unleashed forces that continue to reverberate. As Johnson predicted, voting rights legislation paved the way for decades of Republican ascendancy in the South that only now may be ending. And the lessons of Vietnam - beginning with the realization that it was politically impossible to wage an unpopular war with a conscript Army - are not irrelevant to today's efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The income distribution and health reform challenges of today seem daunting, but the segment of the population directly impacted is significantly smaller. The role played by government changed substantially between when Richard Nixon left the vice presidency in 1961 and moved into the
White House eight years later. Lyndon Johnson is almost entirely responsible for those changes.