Long walk from LBJ to Obama

Barack Obama will make his acceptance speech tonight, Greek temple columns, magically rising stage platform and all, but regardless of whether he wins or loses this election, it will be historic: the first American black leader rising to lead the banner of a major political party.

I have read volumes I through III or biographer Robert Caro’s incomparable profile of the life of President Lyndon Baines Johnson and I look forward to the fourth and final volume he is working on now. In today’s New York Times, Caro takes a look at LBJ’s legacy leading to tonight.

If LBJ, a Southerner, had not overcome seemingly impossible odds to ram a series of civil rights bills through Congress, including the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that finally gave American blacks the right to vote, there would not be Democratic Party Presidential Nominee Barack Obama.

Read Robert Caro’s op-ed to get a historian’s bird’s-eye-view of this climactic moment.

The heroism of the march at Selma, the heroism all across the South, the almost unbelievable bravery of black men and women — and children, so many children — who marched, and were beaten, and marched again, for the right to vote, created the rising tide of national feeling behind the passage of civil rights legislation, the legislation not only of 1965 but of 1964 and 1957. That feeling did so much to make the legislation possible. It has taken me scores of pages in my books to try to describe that heroism, and all of them inadequate. But it also took Lyndon Johnson, whom the black leader James Farmer, sitting in the Oval Office, heard “cajoling, threatening, everything else, whatever was necessary” to get the 1965 bill passed and who, with his legislative genius and savage will, broke, piece by piece, in 1957 and 1964 and 1965, the long unbreakable power of the Southern bloc.

“Abraham Lincoln struck off the chains of black Americans,” I have written, “but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy’s sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life.”

LOOK what has been wrought! Forty-three years ago, a mere blink in history’s eye, many black Americans were unable to vote. Tonight, a black American ascends a stage as nominee for president. “Just give Negroes the vote and many of these problems will get better,” Lyndon Johnson said. “Just give them the vote,” and they can do the rest for themselves.

If Obama wins, he should thank LBJ on his inauguration day. If he loses, no doubt many cries of racism will again be heard. There are many reasons he may lose: his colossal ego, his sleazy and radical friends; his invisible list of accomplishments, his most-liberal-in-Congress voting record, his anti-war, anti-gun, anti-born-alive radical, left-wing, socialist worldview; his doubtful patriotism, his “GDA!” pastor … but racism is the least of these.

Now that I'm finished being magnanimous, Peter Kirsanow at National Review's Corner lists a few more firsts Obama will accomplish.

It's a great and historic moment. We have the first black presidential nominee of a major party in the United States. As Jonah (Goldberg) notes, however, it's unfortunate that the nominee is a liberal with little experience and poor judgment.

And it won't be the only first. In addition Obama will be

• the first presidential nominee known to have a terrorist as a friend and working associate
• the first presidential nominee to vote against a measure designed to prevent a form of infanticide
• the first Commander-in-Chief nominee to dismiss as an elitist a veteran who spent 5 1/2 years being tortured by the enemy
• the first presidential nominee to favor giving habeas corpus rights to foreign terrorists
• the first presidential nominee known to have a pastor who exclaimed "God damn America "
• the first presidential nominee to state that he will talk without precondition to the leaders of state sponsors of terrorism
• the first presidential nominee to support giving driver's licenses to illegal immigrants
• the first presidential nominee to assert that he's embarrassed that his countrymen don't speak French or German
• the first presidential nominee to compare the U.S. infrastructure unfavorably to that of a communist country
• the first presidential nominee to have a more extreme position on life issues than NARAL

Is whatever societal benefit that may be derived from electing the first black president worth having a president who has established the other firsts?