OVER her 22 years in Congress, Maxine Waters has likened bank executives to “gangsters,” snarkily addressed them as “captains of the universe” and threatened to tax their companies “out of business.” The Democrat from Los Angeles, in other words, is not known for showing love to the financial industry. So in March, when she visited a group of community bankers in a conservative corner of her district, she seemed ready for a chilly reception. “Let’s see what these guys have to say for themselves,” Ms. Waters said with a smirk as she emerged from her S.U.V. Escorted to a private conference room at Malaga Bank, Ms. Waters grabbed a seat at the head of the table. A dozen or so bankers shuffled in, each armed with a tale of woe about the Dodd-Frank banking overhaul passed by Congress in the aftermath of the financial crisis. The law is too tough, they groaned. Its capital requirements are too steep. One banker’s voice quivered as she described a regulatory examination of her bank. Another griped about regulators overstepping their bounds: “They can tell you how many pens and pencils we have in our drawers!” In the past, such grumbling might have set off Ms. Waters’s famous hair-trigger temper. But with each complaint, she leaned in for more, nodding appreciatively. “We’ve heard they chase down silly stuff,” Ms. Waters said, referring to regulators and shaking her head in disapproval. “I’m willing to take a hit” to help lower the capital requirements, she said. She even suggested the bankers hire new lobbyists to better represent them. “Influence us,” Ms. Waters said softly, reminding them of her new role as the ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee. “Help us understand the intricacies of your business.” This was not “kerosene Maxine,” the nickname Ms. Waters has earned for her tendency to hurl flammable remarks. (Exhibit A: She once screamed onstage in Los Angeles that “The Tea Party can go straight to hell, and I intend to help them get there.”) Rather, she was all empathy, vowing to use her new sway in Washington to protect the bankers’ interests. “You have a lot of good will right now,” she said. As for Dodd-Frank, Ms. Waters said she stood ready to defend the law, but also instructed the bankers to compile a “laundry list” of their concerns. “I don’t want you to look at this as being impossible to tweak,” she said. After an hour of swiveling nervously in their chairs, the bankers broke into grins. One executive slapped Ms. Waters a high-five. Another embraced her. “You’ve softened,” Paul C. Hudson, the chairman of Broadway Federal Bank, teased Ms. Waters. “I love the new Maxine.” The New Maxine was born in part from Ms. Waters’s ascension, in January, on the House Financial Services Committee. Exonerated in September at the end of a three-year ethics investigation, she replaced Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, for whom the banking overhaul bill was named. The influential Financial Services Committee oversees community banks and Wall Street alike. And Ms. Waters has softened somewhat, not just toward local bankers in her district who might expect her ear, but also toward the Wall Street C.E.O.’s she formerly reviled. In recent months, she dined with John Stumpf, the C.E.O. of Wells Fargo, and met Wall Street chief executives like Michael L. Corbat of Citigroup and Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase. It’s what she called “an open-door policy.” Most notably, given her penchant for railing against Wall Street abuses, she recently pushed regulators to delay certain rule changes on high-stakes derivatives trading. The regulators ultimately agreed. The move may seem at odds with her track record as a rabble-rouser and consumer activist. In her long committee tenure, Ms. Waters positioned herself to the left of fellow Democrats, making her name on issues like affordable housing and foreclosure prevention. Ms. Waters acknowledged that “some of my friends will not agree” with all of her recent decisions. But after two decades in Congress, she says she has learned to pick her battles. One battle emerged in recent days. In the face of intense lobbying pressure, Ms. Waters voted on Tuesday to oppose several House bills that would water down Dodd-Frank, a move that one consumer advocate called “gutsy.”
Sunday, June 2, 2013
Blacks, Conservatives and Plantations
The most recent example of this is E.W. Jackson, who last weekend became the Virginia Republicans’ candidate for lieutenant governor in the state. In a video posted to YouTube in 2012 titled “Bishop E.W. Jackson Message to Black Christians,” Jackson says: “It is time to end the slavish devotion to the Democrat party. They have insulted us, used us and manipulated us. They have saturated the black community with ridiculous lies: ‘Unless we support the Democrat party, we will be returned to slavery. We will be robbed of voting rights. The Martin Luther King holiday will be repealed.’ They think we’re stupid and these lies will hold us captive while they violate everything we believe as Christians.” He continues: “Shame on us for allowing ourselves to be sold to the highest bidder. We belong to God. Our ancestors were sold against their will centuries ago, but we’re going to the slave market voluntarily today. Yes, it’s just that ugly.” (Jackson also took swipes at the gay community and compared Planned Parenthood to the Ku Klux Klan.) The Democrat Plantation theology goes something like this: Democrats use the government to addict and incapacitate blacks by giving them free things — welfare, food stamps and the like. This renders blacks dependent on and beholden to that government and the Democratic Party. This is not completely dissimilar from Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comments, although he never mentioned race: “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. Star Parker, a Scripps Howard syndicated columnist, failed Republican Congressional candidate and author of the book “Uncle Sam’s Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America’s Poor and What We Can do About It,” argued in an article in 2009 on the conservative Web site Townhall: “A benevolent Uncle Sam welcomed mostly poor black Americans onto the government plantation. Those who accepted the invitation switched mind-sets from ‘How do I take care of myself?’ to ‘What do I have to do to stay on the plantation?’" Mackubin Thomas Owens, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, R. I., put it more bluntly in an editorial on the Ashbrook University Web site in 2002: “For the modern liberal Democratic racist as for the old-fashioned one, blacks are simply incapable of freedom. They will always need Ol’ Massa’s help. And woe be to any African-American who wanders off of the Democratic plantation.” That last bit hints at the other part of Democrat Plantation theology: that black Democrats and white liberals are equal enforcers of enslavement. A 2010 unsigned article published on the Web site of the conservative weekly Human Events reads: “If black Americans wish to be Democrats, that is their choice — or is it? Despite the fact that Democrats enjoy the support of over 90% of black America, the other 10%, those who dare to ‘stray from the plantation,’ have been routinely vilified — by other black Americans.” The article continued: “The not-so-subtle message? Support liberal dogma — or face social ostracism.” Dr. Ben Carson, who delivered a speech blasting the president during the National Prayer breakfast this year and quickly became a darling of the right (The Wall Street Journal declared: “Ben Carson for President”), said of white liberals in a radio interview: “They are the most racist people there are. Because they put you in a little category, a little box. You have to think this way. How could you dare come off the plantation?” (Carson also got in trouble for comparing homosexuality to pedophilia and bestiality. He later apologized for those comments, “if anybody was offended.”) Unfortunately, the runaway slave image among many black Republican politicians is becoming ingrained and conservative audiences are applauding them for it. Herman Cain, for example, built an entire presidential campaign on slave imagery. C. Mason Weaver, a radio talk show host, failed Republican Congressional candidate from California and author of the book “It’s OK to Leave the Plantation,” said of President Obama at a 2009 Tea Party rally in Washington: “You thought he was saying was ‘hope and change’; he was saying was ‘ropes and chains,’ not ‘hope and change.’ ” Weaver continued: “Decide today if you’re going to be free or slaves. Decide today if you’re going to be a slave to your master or the master of your own destiny.” Weaver would repeat the “rope and chains” line on Fox and Friends that year. The Rev. C.L. Bryant, a Tea Party member and occasional Fox News guest, even made a movie called “Runaway Slave,” in which he says that America should “run away from socialism, run from statism, run away from progressivism.” While these politicians accuse the vast majority of African-Americans of being mindless drones of the Democrats, they are skating dangerously close to — if not beyond — the point where they become conservative caricatures. The implication that most African-Americans can’t be discerning, that they can’t weigh the pros and cons of political parties and make informed decisions, that they are rendered servile in exchange for social services, is the highest level of insult. And black politicians are the ones Republicans are cheering on as they deliver it. Now who, exactly, is being used here?
Finding Democrats to Run Where Republicans Win
She gained statewide popularity winning three full terms to the House of Representatives, where she voted against President Obama’s health care law, for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, and against cap and trade. That is the type of Democrat who is considered able to win elections in red states. So when Ms. Herseth Sandlin recently announced that she would not run, it not only upended Democratic plans but spurred deeper reflection over exactly what kind of candidate should represent the party — one who adheres to the party’s core principles or someone moderate, even conservative, enough to appeal to more voters? The debate in South Dakota could set a guidepost for Democrats nationwide weighing candidates’ electability versus their ideological purity. South Dakota is among three states where the balancing act in choosing a candidate who reflects the party’s values, yet can attract enough voters to win, could be particularly important in next year’s Senate elections. There, and in West Virginia and Montana, the Democratic incumbent is retiring, but in all three states, voters went resoundingly Republican in last year’s presidential contest, suggesting that keeping the seat in Democratic hands will be an uphill battle. And at the same time, the Democratic incumbents who are vying for re-election in three reliably Republican states — Arkansas, Alaska and Louisiana — expect difficult challenges as well. That makes a total of six seats — precisely the number Republicans need to retake control of the Senate. Democrats say the split in their party between ideological activists and moderates is not nearly as pronounced as it is in the Republican Party, where some are blaming right-wing purists for the party’s disappointing showing in the 2012 elections. But as Congress and state legislatures tackle core liberal issues like gun control, health care and gay rights, Democrats are starting to engage in their own soul-searching. Several liberal groups, for instance, have said they might find candidates to challenge the Democratic senators who voted against tightening gun background-check laws. “There’s a substantial population of the electorate coast to coast that wishes the Democrats would elect candidates who are stronger on certain issues,” said James R. Fleischmann, who has advised several red-state Democrats including Senator Max Baucus of Montana, who is retiring. “But there’s not a powerful organized strain of purists trying to correct what they perceive to be the incorrect position of the party.” Here in South Dakota, with Ms. Herseth Sandlin opting out of the Senate race, the only declared Democratic candidate so far is Rick Weiland, a small-business owner who has said he would fight corporate interests. Mr. Weiland also favors same-sex marriage and universal background checks for guns, and he is concerned about the weakening of Social Security and Medicare. Mr. Weiland has the support of his onetime boss, Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader (also a South Dakota Democrat), and of the party’s more liberal base. But his candidacy has upset some in the Democratic establishment. Many South Dakota Democrats are hoping for a centrist to compete in a state where the number of registered independents has increased nearly 20 percent over the past five years, while Democratic registration has dipped 7 percent. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the current majority leader, had said he would prefer that someone other than Mr. Weiland run, according to Mr. Daschle. A spokesman for Mr. Reid declined to comment. Mr. Daschle said he believed that Mr. Weiland would be able to earn the establishment’s support. “I’ve been through this hundreds of times — a candidate has to prove himself or herself before they get support of the D.S.C.C.,” he said, referring to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in Washington. “I believe Rick will be able to do that.” But Jason Frerichs, a state senator who leads the Democrats’ seven-member minority caucus, said, “We are a state that comes to the center.”
Saturday, June 1, 2013
Two Congressmen Invite Texans From Both Parties to Breakfast
But Mr. Brady is a Republican and Mr. Gallego is a Democrat, which in Washington might make them enemies. They are not following the script, though. Mr. Brady and Mr. Gallego are trying to bring together all 38 Texans who serve in Congress to find common ground and discuss how to advance the state’s agenda in the nation’s capital. A bipartisan breakfast has been scheduled for Thursday, and so far at least nine members, seven of them former state legislators, have said they will attend. Mr. Brady and Mr. Gallego are pursuing the others. “There’s a new willingness among the Texas delegation, particularly among those of us who worked together in the State Legislature, to reach across the aisle,” said Mr. Gallego, who represents a border district stretching from San Antonio to the outskirts of El Paso. “We remember when friendship trumped partisanship.” Although the Legislature has gotten bogged down in partisanship of its own, the party lines have never run as deep as those in Washington. Even today, with Democrats far outnumbered by Republicans at the Texas Capitol, members of the minority party retain powerful committee chairmanships and often carry high-profile bills. Mr. Brady, who represents a conservative swath of suburbia north of Houston, said pulling the former state legislators together in Washington “seemed like a natural thing to do.” Expanding it to the entire delegation made sense, he said, because there are many issues around which the Texans can unite, like NASA financing, agriculture and energy policy. “These issues affect our state, so regardless of what party you’re in, we want to make sure we’re all working together in the same direction,” Mr. Brady said. “Texas trumps partisan concerns, and we just need to pull together for our state regardless of party.” Former United States House Speaker Sam Rayburn, a Democrat from North Texas who served in the House from 1913 until his death in 1961, fostered a tradition of home-state unity in his delegation. But he served at a time when Democrats ruled Texas. Still, he had clashes with United States Representative Bruce Alger of Dallas, who was the only Republican in the delegation when he took office in 1955. Starting in 1993, United States Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison — a former State House member — brought Texans from both parties together for regular meetings, but those tapered off in recent years amid bitter redistricting clashes. For the new effort, Mr. Gallego is handling the task of rounding up the delegation’s other 11 Democrats. Mr. Brady is handling invitations to the other 23 Republican House members as well as to Texas’ United States senators, John Cornyn and the Tea Party firebrand Ted Cruz, both Republicans. Before the meeting on Thursday, the bipartisanship effort will face its first potentially divisive decision: where to find breakfast tacos worthy of discerning Texas taste buds. They are “not as easy to find in D.C. as you might imagine,” Mr. Gallego said.
The World As Wonkblog Sees It
Jonathan Chait’s Atlantic profile of Josh Barro, the Bloomberg View blogger and columnist who’s gradually transitioned from reform-minded center-right pundit to entertaining scourge of the contemporary G.O.P., has launched a lot of discussion about conservative reform projects in general, and (for my sins) I’ll probably write a post or two on that theme later this week. To start with, though, I think it’s worth saying something in response to this post from Ezra Klein, which uses Barro’s recent arc as a case study in the Republican Party’s intellectual self-marginalization:
Over the last few years, the Republican Party has been retreating from policy ground they once held and salting the earth after them. This has coincided with, and perhaps even been driven by, the Democratic Party pushing into policy positions they once rejected as overly conservative. The result is that the range of policies you can hold and still be a Republican is much narrower than it was in, say, 2005. That’s left a lot of once-Republican wonks without an obvious political home.
Klein goes on to talk about health care (where Republicans used to be open to an individual mandate, but no longer) and climate change (where there used to be G.O.P. support for cap-and-trade, but no longer), and then makes a broader point:
As the Republican Party’s range of acceptable policies has narrowed, the Democratic Party’s range has expanded. Stimulus based entirely on tax cuts? It’s not their preference, but they’ll take it. Market-based approaches to environmental regulation? Sure, why not. Capping the employer-based exclusion for health care? Of course. Hundreds of billions of dollars in entitlement cuts to help reduce the deficit? Uh-huh.
If you imagine a policy spectrum that that goes from 1-10 in which 1 is the most liberal policy, 10 is the most conservative policy, and 5 is that middle zone that used to hold both moderate Democrats and Republicans, the basic shape of American politics today is that the Obama administration can and will get Democrats to agree to anything ranging from 1 to 7.5 and Republicans will reject anything that’s not an 8, 9, or 10. The result, as I’ve written before, is that President Obama’s record makes him look like a moderate Republicans from the late-90s.
A lot could be written on why the Republican Party has been so quick to abandon these positions. I’ll leave that for another time. The point here is that it’s happened, and it’s left a lot of policy wonks who could’ve easily fit into the Republican Party a decade ago in a tough position.
That there are important issues where the G.O.P. has retreated into a kind of policy bunker, with uncomfortable consequences for writers with center-right views on those issues, is not a point that I’m likely to dispute! But I think that Klein’s “basic shape of American politics” paragraph misleads on two counts.
First, you can’t just bracket the “why” of the G.O.P.’s shift without downplaying the ways in which the basic ground of our policy debates has shifted since 2006 as well. For instance, a carbon tax or cap-and-trade bill might have looked like a sensible-centrist “5? back when Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich were sharing a couch. But back then we were pre-crash and thought we were considerably richer than we actually were; back then the prospects for a meaningful global climate treaty looked much better than they do post-Copenhagen; back then global temperatures were expected to rise faster in the short term than they actually have; and back then we hadn’t yet knocked our own carbon dioxide emissions down to 1994 levels without a cap and trade bill.
None of these trends prove the case against carbon taxation, but I would submit that they should at least nudge the position that a sweeping regulatory response to climate change occupies on the spectrum of American policy debates — toward a slightly left-of-center “4,” perhaps? In which case the G.O.P.’s opposition isn’t just a matter of a sudden rightward lurch (though that’s clearly part of the story). It’s also a matter of changing circumstances making a particular program both more politically unpopular (Mitt Romney did not lose in 2012 because of climate change, to put it mildly) and more doubtful as policy, with inevitable consequences for the opposition party’s attitude on the issue.
Second, Klein’s definition of the “policy spectrum” is confined to the set of debates that tends to confirm his hypothesis, while leaving a number of high-profile, highly-contested arenas out. For instance, I think it’s fair to say that there’s a much livelier debate about immigration policy within the Republican Party right now than there is within the Democratic Party (where the Byron Dorgan/Barbara Jordan tendency has mostly disappeared or been suppressed), and the G.O.P.’s uncertainty and internal tensions arguably puts it closer to the center of public opinion than does the pro-amnesty lockstep on the Democratic side of the aisle. On foreign policy and national security, meanwhile, President Obama does clearly occupy a kind of center, but his Republican critics are attacking him (and each other) on a variety of fronts — hawkish, civil libertarian, etc. — that reflect the G.O.P.’s increasingly interesting internal debate, rather than just huddling together at a “9? on the Cheney scale. The debate over entitlement reform doesn’t quite fit with Klein’s paradigm either: On Medicare, for instance, the Obama-era Republicans have alternated between cynical “Mediscare” arguments (whose ideological valence is both right-wing and left-wing at once) and arguments for premium support, which is arguably a centrist proposal, a “6? in the spectrum of 1998 or so, that Democrats have had to move leftward in order to effectively demonize.
And then there are social issues, where it’s the Democratic Party that’s become notably more ideologically conformist in the Obama era — more likely to pick fights over religious liberty, more absolutist on abortion, and lately more inclined to make support for gay marriage a party-wide litmus test. This social-issues consolidation is partially a rational response to underlying ideological shifts, of course (the electorate has grown more “spiritual but not religious” in the last decade, and support for gay marriage was a “2? or “3? in 2006 and probably a “6? today), and partially a defensive response to a G.O.P. that’s been pushing harder on pro-life legislation at both the state and national level. But that, again, makes the case against using ’06 as a permanent baseline for assessing what counts as centrism, and what’s ideologically extreme.
Stepping back a bit, my fellow heterodox conservative James Poulos responded to Klein’s post with an extended brief against the wonkification of punditry, and the ideology-smuggling assumption that “our biggest problems would be better addressed by letting our smartest experts direct our activity toward a solution.” As someone slightly more sympathetic to the wonkish turn in political writing, I would make a narrower point. Left-of-center wonks, like all of us, have a particular set of issues that inspires and defines their engagement with politics, and like all of us they tend to assume that their issues are the most important issues that there are. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that the more you narrow the scope of American politics to the issues that Klein built his reputation covering and that Wonkblog treats in great depth, the more centrist and reasonable liberalism looks, and the more difficult the position of the conservative pundit can seem. Nor should it be surprising that how alienated a given right-of-center writer feels from the contemporary G.O.P. depends on how many premises and interests he shares in common with liberal wonks — a lot for a Rockefeller Republican (or maybe neoliberal) like Barro; some for a social conservative, would-be-1970s neoconservative like me; fewer for others somewhat further rightward, and so on.
This doesn’t mean that liberals can’t profitably analyze this alienation: The Plight of the Conservative Wonk, As Seen From The Vantage Point of Liberal Wonkery, is certainly an entertaining-enough genre, and sometimes an illuminating one. But it would profit from keeping its own distinctive vantage point in mind.
Friday, May 31, 2013
Immigrant Measure Still Backed by Gays
Advocates focused their fury on several Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, which considered more than 300 amendments to the bill, after the senators warned the chairman, Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, that they would not vote for an amendment he wanted to introduce. The measure by Mr. Leahy, also a Democrat, would have allowed American citizens to seek permanent resident status — a document known as a green card — for a foreign same-sex partners. But as the bill now moves to the Senate floor, the political damage from the episode for the Democrats — including senators who have been firm allies of gay causes like Mr. Leahy, Charles E. Schumer of New York and Richard J. Durbin of Illinois — may not be as severe as it first appeared. Gay rights advocates, stepping back from the loss, said the overhaul still contained many measures that could benefit gay immigrants, most of which came through the committee gantlet unscathed. Other provisions that the committee agreed to add to the bill, dealing with asylum and immigration detention, had been the subject of vigorous lobbying by gay organizations. The committee outcome was a relief for Republicans in the bipartisan group of eight senators that wrote the bill, who had said the same-sex amendment would cripple the entire measure. By fending it off, Republicans held on to crucial support from evangelical Christians and Roman Catholics. “To try to redefine marriage within the immigration bill would mean the bill would fall apart,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Republican, told Mr. Leahy in the moments of high suspense last Tuesday evening before the Vermont senator announced his decision. Mr. Graham said support from conservative evangelical churches, which have put on an ambitious campaign to pass the overhaul, “made it possible for a guy like me to survive the emotional nature of this debate.” One activist who had intensely mixed feelings about the committee’s results was Felipe Sousa-Rodriguez, co-director of Get Equal, an organization that seeks legal equality for gay people. “I can’t deny my outrage when I felt betrayed,” said Mr. Sousa-Rodriguez, who said he had delivered thousands of petitions to Mr. Schumer’s Washington office just a week earlier. But he said he was ready to push for the bill on the Senate floor, where lawmakers expect to take it up the week of June 10. “Many of my friends will benefit from the overall legislation,” he said. Like many gay advocates, Mr. Sousa-Rodriguez, who was born in Brazil, sees the legislation from several angles. He is one of as many as 1.7 million young immigrants who were brought here illegally as children. Those immigrants would be eligible under the Senate bill for an accelerated five-year path to citizenship. They include a vocal contingent of youths who are gay. But Mr. Sousa-Rodriguez is also legally married to an immigrant from Colombia, Juan, who is about to become an American citizen. If the same-sex amendment were to become law, Mr. Sousa-Rodriguez’s husband could seek a green card for him immediately, without waiting five years. In the Judiciary Committee debate, Mr. Leahy kept everyone, including his own staff, wondering until the final hour whether he would formally introduce the same-sex amendment. He had sponsored similar legislation many times in the Senate, and he left no doubt in his opening statement about his strong support for the provision. But then he turned to the other senators on the committee, asking them for their views. In agonized comments the Democrats, also including Dianne Feinstein of California and Al Franken of Minnesota, replayed the Republican warnings that the measure would be a deal breaker. According to several Senate aides, the Democrats were surprised and miffed that Mr. Leahy shifted the burden to them to nix the amendment. “He did it in a way that made others walk the plank and kept his hands clean,” one Democratic aide said, “and that was not appreciated.” In the end Mr. Leahy withheld his amendment, leaving open the option of introducing it later. The committee sent the bill to the Senate floor on a strong bipartisan vote.
L.B.J.’s Gettysburg Address
In American history, 1963 was a year rich in speeches. But of all the signature speeches that year, it’s the one that has been all but forgotten that might have transformed the country the most. Fifty years ago, on Memorial Day in 1963, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson gave a speech in Gettysburg, Pa., that foreshadowed profound changes that would be achieved in only 13 months and that mark us still. The occasion was a speech that almost wasn’t given at all, for an anniversary that was still a month off, delivered by a man who had grown weary of his apparent uselessness in an office that neither interested him nor engaged his capacious gifts. It is a reminder that the titanic events of history sometimes occur away from the main stage — and proof of the power of a great idea, even if it is delivered ahead of its time. “One hundred years ago, the slave was freed,” Johnson said at the cemetery in a ceremony marking the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. “One hundred years later, the Negro remains in bondage to the color of his skin.” With those two sentences, Johnson accomplished two things. He answered King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail.” And he signaled where the later Johnson administration might lead, which was to the legislation now known as the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Six months later, after Kennedy was assassinated, Johnson became president and vowed to press ahead on civil rights, saying that was what the presidency was for — even though he was a Southern Democrat and many of his Congressional allies were devout segregationists. And yet Johnson nearly didn’t give his Gettysburg speech at all. He dismissed the invitation with a shrug when it arrived in the vice president’s office. He was distracted, distressed and depressed. Almost nothing interested him. He was moping too much, “and it was becoming obvious,” George E. Reedy, a Johnson press secretary, said in an oral history recorded for the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Tex. “He just looked lugubrious. He reminded me of one of those Tennessee bloodhounds, you know, with the drooping ears.” His closest aides never sent Johnson’s regrets to the Gettysburg invitation, leaving the option open, hoping to lure the vice president to use the occasion to break out of his funk. Juanita Roberts, Johnson’s personal secretary, saw special appeal in the opportunity, and she dashed off a note to Horace Busby, who was Johnson’s head speechwriter. “Do you think something good could be made here?” she wondered. “The distinguished son of distinguished confederates on the 100th anniv. of the battle —.” Then she wrote Johnson directly, saying, “I can’t regret this one yet — I am excited by the possibilities it could offer.” She told the vice president that this was a chance to deliver “a masterpiece to be remembered by” and suggested that Dwight D. Eisenhower, living in Gettysburg in retirement from the presidency, might be drawn to the event. By then the idea had gained momentum, all except the Eisenhower element. “Bringing in nationally prominent Republicans, however, could reduce the advantage of this situation,” a top Johnson aide, probably Busby, wrote in an unsigned internal memo that now rests in the files of the Johnson Library. All politics, in L.B.J.’s time as in ours, is personal. So Busby drove over to the Elms, Johnson’s house in the Spring Valley section of Northwest Washington, and sat by the pool as the vice president, who was deeply affected by his experience as a young man teaching Mexican-American children, thought aloud about race. Busby was so startled by how fluent and articulate Johnson was that on the way home he pulled his car over to the curb and recorded what Johnson had said. The final product, shaped by Busby and Harry C. McPherson Jr., another close adviser, thus was more stenography than speech craftsmanship — and it was all the more powerful if you looked carefully at Johnson’s remarks and saw how they grew out of King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” in which the civil-rights leader spoke of his frustration with the pace of change: “For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.’ ” Johnson’s speech directly addressed King: “The Negro today asks justice. We do not answer him — we do not answer those who lie beneath this soil — when we reply to the Negro by asking, ‘Patience.’ It is empty to plead that the solution to the dilemmas of the present rests on the hands of the clock.” The speech was given on Memorial Day, May 30, 1963, not on the anniversary of a battle now regarded as a turning point in the Civil War. Johnson’s visit to Gettysburg was a helicopter trip that took but 2 hours and 34 minutes, start to finish, but it was indicative of the bigger journey he would take as president.
David M. Shribman is the executive editor of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and a former Washington correspondent for The New York Times and for The Boston Globe, where he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for his coverage of politics.
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