The Quest for a 'New Day for America'

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"[M]ay we ... just quietly and silently — each in our own way — pray for our country? And may we just share for a moment a few of those immortal words of the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi — words which I think may help heal the wounds and lift our hearts? Listen to this immortal saint: 'Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light.' Those are the words of a saint. And may those of us of less purity listen to them well. And may America tonight resolve that never, never again shall we see what we have seen."

Vice President Hubert Humphrey
Chicago, Aug. 29, 1968

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Hubert Humphrey faced a difficult task 45 years ago tonight. In hindsight, it was probably an impossible one.

By nature a man of peace, the vice president had to deliver his speech accepting the Democratic Party's presidential nomination against the backdrop of chaos in the streets of the host city, Chicago, and the broader backdrops of a war in Vietnam that was growing increasingly unpopular and a crime–plagued nation.

"After its days of turbulence and excitement," wrote historian Theodore H. White, "no speech could have pulled the Democratic convention together except a masterpiece ..."

Humphrey, White observed, tried to do the impossible — rewrite his speech (which had been crafted in the weeks and months leading up to the convention) in the days and hours before he was scheduled to deliver it. The "Happy Warrior" wanted to offer a message of healing and unity, not merely rehashes of old talking points.

But even before the turbulence of Chicago, that was something that was easier said than done, given the fact that, as the vice president, Humphrey was expected to be supportive of the administration — even though he disagreed with the administration on several aspects of the conduct of the war. So, too, did many of the delegates — and millions of Americans watching on TV.

After the clashes between demonstrators and the Chicago police earlier that week, the task became even more daunting, but Humphrey knew that both the delegates in the convention hall and Americans watching on TV would expect to hear him speak about peace in a context that encompassed not only the war but deteriorating relations between and respect for fellow Americans.

"A man of more native eloquence than any of his advisers," White wrote, "Humphrey might, had he had time, have created the required masterpiece. But he had no time."

Ah, yes, time. It was running out on the Democrats. And Humphrey did not produce the necessary masterpiece.

In August 1968, Gallup reported for the first — but not the last — time that the share of Americans who responded "no" when asked if the United States had made a mistake sending troops to Vietnam was less than 40%.

Three years earlier, the share of Americans who said "no" to that question was 61%. The pro–war administration of which Humphrey had been a part for more than 3½ years was losing ground on war and peace — and that issue, more than anything else, would decide who won the election.

It was the growing opposition to the war that had sparked the riots in the first place. One can only wonder how much worse they would have been if Lyndon Johnson had been in town to accept the nomination. But he had withdrawn from the campaign in March, making it necessary to nominate someone else, and the logical someone else was Johnson's second in command.

But Humphrey's convention was being tarnished by violence in the streets. Was there anything he could say to erase that image from the voters' memories?

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Humphrey had chosen as his second in command Ed Muskie, senator from Maine, and Muskie did his best to energize the delegates.

But Humphrey, who called for a "new day for America" in his speech, awoke the next day to more of the same.

"Whatever hope there was ... rested on the belief that words can soothe, that words can heal, that words carry a message," White wrote.

Actions speak louder than words, my mother told me when I was small, and the actions in Chicago spoke louder than any words Humphrey could speak.

At some point in the predawn hours of the final night of the convention, something apparently was thrown from one of the floors of the hotel where Eugene McCarthy's campaign operation was based — which led to an inevitable clash between the students who made up most of McCarthy's staff and the Chicago police, who were understandably weary from a week of confrontations and, apparently, acted independently of any chain of command.

What America saw on its TV screens was more of the same — young people being beaten by police — and America's voters would decide that they wanted a change.

"[W]hen Humphrey's campaign began with a sickening lurch," wrote historian William Manchester, "his admirers despaired."

Perhaps they knew what was coming.

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Forecasting an Incumbent's Chances

We are just about six months away from the 2012 election.

In the early days of my collegiate career, I was a political science major, and one of the things my professors drummed into my head (and the heads of my peers) was the conviction that voters reach their conclusions about an incumbent about six months before the election.

That is a piece of conventional wisdom that has held up rather well, whereas I have found that people who rely on surveys that measure the likability of an incumbent inevitably are misled.

When times are generally good, as they were when George W. Bush ran against Al Gore, voters can afford the luxury of picking the presidential candidate with whom they would rather share a beer. (Of course, the incumbent wasn't on the ballot that year.)

But when times are not good, likability takes a backseat to competence with most voters. In 1972, for example, when Richard Nixon was seeking a second term, the Vietnam War was still unpopular and there was some dissatisfaction with the economy, but voters were influenced more by whether they thought he was doing a good job (and most did) than whether they liked him (and most did not).

Job approval surveys didn't make their debut until Franklin Roosevelt had already won his second term — and FDR has always struck me as being a special case, having been elected president four times. The margins were different each time, and, of course, one of the issues when Roosevelt sought his third and fourth terms was whether any American president should be allowed to serve more than two terms. Some people who had supported him the first two times opposed him the second two times for that very reason.

Those campaigns for the third and fourth terms qualify as unique cases, therefore, and job approval surveys were still evolving, anyway, so the conventional wisdom of which my professors spoke isn't really applicable.

Nor, for that matter, is it applicable to 1948, when Harry Truman defeated Tom Dewey in an "upset."

I don't mean to suggest that Truman's victory wasn't a surprise (it was) or that voters were insincere when they told pollsters they didn't approve of the job he was doing.

I'm just mindful of the fact that Truman was completing FDR's fourth term. He hadn't been elected president. He was elected vice president.

And, while I can't speak for everyone, I can say that I have never based my presidential preference on the identity of the running mate. Those who choose which ticket to support on that basis are all but assuming that the guy at the top of the ticket won't complete the term.

That strikes me as being the same thing as trying to prove a negative, and, at least in my opinion, it is the wrong way to choose a president.

(In 1980, I did know some people who supported Ronald Reagan because George H.W. Bush was his running mate, and they figured that there was no way Reagan could survive the term. They became increasingly frustrated as Reagan simply refused to die — even after he had been shot — and they wound up having to wait eight years until Bush was elected on his own.

(There are sure to be some who have voted on that basis in other elections. I'm confident there were those who voted against some Republican tickets because Sarah Palin or Dan Quayle were on them. But my gut feeling is that their numbers were few.)

Besides, job approval surveys were still evolving, as I say, and the 1948 election would have a significant influence on how such surveys were conducted in the future.

So I don't include Roosevelt or Truman in such comparisons. Approval polling methods were still primitive when they occupied the White House.

But, by 1956, when Dwight Eisenhower sought his second term, a lot had been learned.

For one thing, pollsters kept polling right up until Election Day. They didn't stop polling long before the election, as they had in 1948 because it was a foregone conclusion that Truman would lose.

In early May 1956, Gallup found that 69% of respondents approved of the job Eisenhower had been doing.

A lot of that may have been due to something of a wave of sympathy for Ike. He had suffered a heart attack about eight months earlier. If the May approval rating was influenced by his health, that wave crested well before Election Day 1956, but Eisenhower still carried 41 states and received 57% of the popular vote.

Eisenhower's successor, John F. Kennedy, died before the end of his term, and his vice president, Lyndon Johnson, had been president for less than a year when he won a full term.

Six months before the election, three–fourths of the respondents to a Gallup survey approved of the job that he was doing — but that, too, may have been the result of public sympathy.

Johnson went on to win the 1964 election by a landslide — but, four years later, the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War forced Johnson to drop out of the race, and a month after he did so, the approval ratings appeared to confirm the wisdom of his decision.

In April 1968, Johnson's approval rating, as reported by Gallup, dropped below 50% and never exceeded that number again. It was tumbling by May.

Consequently, Johnson's decision to drop out of the race seems prescient in hindsight. Odds are, he wouldn't have been successful, even if he had been renominated.

Nixon replaced LBJ, and his Gallup approval ratings in May 1972 hinted at what was to come.

Nixon's job approval six months before the election was somewhere between 54% (his rating in late April) and 62% (his rating in late May). On Election Day, more than three–fifths of the voters endorsed his bid for a second term.

One can argue, of course, that Nixon's campaign was tainted by the illegal activities of his staff and his own involvement in efforts to cover up those activities. But the bottom line is that the job approval ratings pretty accurately measured how voters felt about the Nixon presidency in mid–1972.

Nixon's second term was cut short by the Watergate scandal, and his replacement, Gerald Ford, enjoyed high approval ratings in his first month in office, but his ratings declined rapidly after he pardoned Nixon.

In May 1976, he received approval ratings that hinted at what would happen in the election. For members of Barack Obama's staff, it might be instructive to study the Ford campaign because Ford's approval in mid–1976 was close to where Obama's has been lately — just short of 50%.

Ford, of course, went on to lose to Jimmy Carter in a very close election. Some people have been tempted to presume that it was almost entirely because, not having voted for him to begin with, voters felt no real allegiance to Ford — but he lost largely due to his job performance, because he pardoned Nixon, not because voters stopped liking him. He was still affable Jerry Ford in the minds of most.

But voters did not like the decision to pardon Nixon.

The voters definitely soured on Carter by the time he sought a second term in 1980, and the approval ratings six months out did more than hint at that. In May 1980, Gallup found that the share of voters who approved of the job he had been doing was in the upper 30s and lower 40s.

When the voters went to the polls that November, Carter received 41% of the vote and carried six states. Reagan was elected in a landslide.

In 1984, Reagan won a second term in spite of a jobless rate that was higher than it had been for any successful incumbent in nearly 50 years.

It was conceded at the time that Reagan was widely liked by the American people, but their electoral endorsement of his presidency in November was foreshadowed by Gallup polls in May that indicated that (1) a majority approved of the job he was doing, and (2) that majority was growing, not declining.

When the votes were counted in November, Reagan received nearly 59% of the vote and carried 49 states.

Reagan's vice president, George H.W. Bush, was elected in 1988 when Reagan was constitutionally prohibited from running again, and his lightning–like victory in the Gulf War seemed to be propelling him to a second term — but a funny thing happened to Bush on the way. A recession derailed him.

The recession was mild by historical standards — certainly when compared to the one that Americans have been slogging through since late 2007 — but it was bad enough to lower Bush's approval ratings from the 50s in late 1991 to 42% by May 1992, according to Gallup.

Once again, it was a reliable predictor of the incumbent's fate. Bush went on to lose to Bill Clinton in a three–man race.

The economy was better four years later when Clinton sought his second term.

Clinton's Democrats lost control of Congress during the 1994 midterms, but Clinton, through a combination of shrewd political moves and sheer good fortune, was on an upward trajectory in May 1996. Six months before the election, CNN/Time reported that 51% of Americans approved of the job he was doing; Gallup found that 55% approved.

The endorsements were solid, if not resounding — as were November's election returns. Clinton was re–elected with 49% of the vote and the support of 31 states.

In 2000, of course, George W. Bush defeated Gore in the Electoral College but lost the popular vote. Although extremely rare, such an outcome was not unheard of — but, to be old enough to remember the last time it happened, one would have to be at least 130 years old when Bush was elected — and there were no job approval surveys in those days.

That probably made Bush something of an exception to the conventional wisdom concerning the relationship between job approval numbers and eventual electoral verdicts on incumbents — since he hadn't received the support of at least a plurality of the voters the first time, as nearly every duly elected president has.

But the job approval rule still held true when Bush sought his second term in 2004.

The job approval ratings in May 2004 warned Bush that he would face a close race in November. NBC/Wall Street Journal, Gallup and other surveys in early May found about as many Americans who disapproved of his job performance as approved.

And that was borne out in the general election, when Bush received less than 51% of the vote and the support of 31 states. In the Electoral College, he defeated John Kerry by 35, 286 to 251.

What will all this mean in the 2012 election? I guess that remains to be seen.

Next Sunday is precisely six months from Election Day, so any job approval numbers that are announced on or after that date could be said to be potential indicators of what to expect in November.

But Gallup reports that, according to his job approval average for his 13th quarter in office, Obama's ratings are below the average for presidents who went on to win re–election.

They're even below one president — Carter — who was defeated in his campaign for re–election.

J. Robert Smith makes intriguing observations in American Thinker that speak to the relevance of history — even though he doesn't connect the dots between job approval ratings and an incumbent's odds of winning a second term.

"Presidential election history gives us indications," Smith writes, "that Mr. Obama either squeaks back into the White House or gets an undignified boot in the back of his designer trousers. ... [O]nly Jerry Ford lost his re–election bid narrowly. Odds are, if Mr. Obama loses, it will probably be on the order of [Herbert] Hoover (1932) or Carter (1980)."

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When East Met West

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"This was the week that changed the world."

Richard Nixon

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In hindsight, I don't think I really understood the significance of what was happening when, 40 years ago today, Richard Nixon began his historic trip to the People's Republic of China.

I wasn't old enough. I had a general understanding of the fact that the United States had been fighting a war in Vietnam (actually, I couldn't remember a time when America wasn't involved in that conflict — for awhile, I guess I must have thought that Vietnamwar was all one word, like damnyankee — and I must have figured that it was a constant fact of life). I knew that there was another war being waged — called a "Cold War" — but I didn't know what that meant.

To my young mind, Nixon's trip to China seemed terribly contradictory. As I understood things (and my understanding was shaped considerably by my Democratic parents, who made no secret of the fact that they loathed Nixon), Nixon escalated American military involvement in Vietnam, presumably because of the belief that if Vietnam fell to the Communists, so would the other countries in the region, and that could not be allowed to happen — yet he went to great lengths to ease tensions with the Communists in China.

And, later that year, he went to the Soviet Union, where he ushered in detente and signed the Anti–Ballistic Missile Treaty. It didn't make sense to me. Nixon, I had heard, was a virulent anticommunist. Why was he going to such great lengths to be a friend to the Chinese?

I have come to understand that Nixon was walking a diplomatic tightrope, trying to end a war in southeast Asia without yielding the territory to the Communists while simultaneously opening lines of communication with the Communist superpowers.

I have also come to understand that Nixon was one of the early practitioners of triangulation. His visit to China threw genuine fear into the Soviets, who were concerned about the possibility of an alliance between the Chinese and the Americans. Consequently, they were more agreeable to detente.

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That was the key, I was told. Only Nixon, with his anticommunist credentials, could have done something as globally stunning as his trips to China and Russia in 1972, playing one against the other and, essentially, getting more from each than he originally sought.

By anyone's standards, that would be a particularly challenging mission, but, in the spring of 1972, while the Democrats were trying to settle on a nominee to face Nixon in the general election that fall, Nixon went to China and got tons of free publicity.

In a different (yet still similar) sense, it was the foreign policy equivalent of Lyndon Johnson's domestic agenda, most notably his support for civil and voting rights legislation.

Racism was never confined to the South, but it was most prominent there, and, for that reason, I have heard it said, it took a president from a Southern state who rose from humble beginnings to get those laws pushed through Congress.

When LBJ told the nation "We shall overcome," it had more significance than it would have if it had come from the mouth of Johnson's patrician predecessor from New England.

Similarly, when Richard Nixon told the nation that his trip to China had changed the world, it had the weight of legitimacy behind it. Nixon was often — and justifiably — criticized for not being honest and sincere, but his visit to China went beyond the man and embraced the moment and charted a new course for the future.

So many things have changed in the 40 years since Nixon's trip to China. Before he went there, most Americans probably thought of a medieval culture, a closed society, when they thought of China. Or they thought of the stereotype of Asian markets producing inferior goods.

After television brought images of the modern China to America, that perception was changed forever.

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Ghosts of '68

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As the polls of Republican voters have been careening from one anti–Mitt to the next, chatter about the possibility of a brokered convention has been rising above the din.

My original inclination was to dismiss such talk. The prospect just seemed too remote.

My parents weren't old enough to vote the last time there was a brokered convention. But the rapid rise and fall of challengers to the consistent frontrunner, Mitt Romney, has led me to conclude that a brokered convention is a real possibility. It may still be remote, but it is real.

Many Republicans seem to think Romney isn't committed enough to Republican values so the search has been on for someone else. And there just might be enough of those disgruntled Republicans to deny Romney enough delegate support to wrap up the nomination on the first ballot.

The problem is that each someone else to whom Republicans have flocked has been shown to be flawed in some way. It wouldn't be so bad if the flaws were thought to be modest, but these flaws have been too great for most Republicans.

Romney is always accused of being too wishy washy, a waffler, a flip–flopper. The same thing might be said of any Republican who ran for office in dark–blue Massachusetts — but he has been the one true constant in this volatile campaign. His rivals have risen and fallen, but Romney has remained about where he was from the beginning — around 25%.

That level of support won't be sufficient, his detractors argue, and I agree — if it remains where it has been through most of 2011.

But it won't.

I think it will start to fluctuate once the primaries and caucuses begin — and the fluctuations are likely to be upward. There is a kind of finality about primaries — and caucuses, too, for that matter. It is different from the phase we have been watching this year, which is dominated by fluid and non–binding polls.

Actual delegates are committed to candidates in the primaries and caucuses; there are real numbers to hang your hat on. True, those delegates are only committed through the first ballot — but delegates are not assigned to candidates at random. Those who come to the convention pledged to support Candidate A reached that point because they were true believers in Candidate A.

Unless Candidate A drops out after the first ballot, my guess is that they are likely to remain with Candidate A even if they are no longer bound by party rules to do so.

All of that remains hypothetical at this stage because no Republican convention has gone past the first ballot since Tom Dewey was nominated in three ballots to face President Truman in 1948.

Democrats hope that history will repeat itself in 2012 — an embattled Democratic president, running against a "do–nothing Congress," comes from behind to stage an upset victory and triumphantly waves the early edition of a metro newspaper prematurely proclaiming his electoral demise.

(In the 21st–century version, I guess the image — digital, of course — would be of Obama holding up a laptop with the message "Romney (or Gingrich or Paul or whomever) Defeats Obama.").

Perhaps that is what fate has in store. I have my doubts. I still believe the prevailing economic conditions will have an overwhelming influence on the outcome of next year's elections — unless something totally unexpected happens to distracts the public's attention a week or two before the election.

Republicans, on the other hand, have been wishing for a repeat of 1980, when a charismatic Republican (Ronald Reagan) emerged to defeat an embattled Democratic president (Jimmy Carter) in the general election.

Which scenario you see developing may depend upon which side you favor, but, from a purely historical standpoint, the election I see as having the most in common with the campaign upon which we have embarked is the 1968 campaign.

Then, as now, a Democrat was in the White House. He had been quite popular when he was elected four years earlier, but his approval ratings had steadily declined and his party had lost a lot of seats in Congress in the midterm elections.

"Of the paradox of Lyndon Johnson historians will write many books," wrote Theodore H. White in "The Making of the President 1968."

"Few men have done more good in their time, and no president has pressed more visionary ideas into law. Yet few have earned more abuse and roused less love, loyalty and affection from those he sought to help."

Seems like the kind of thing that some of Barack Obama's supporters might be inclined to write about him when the story of the 2012 presidential campaign is written.

Johnson decided not to seek renomination after he nearly lost the New Hampshire primary to Eugene McCarthy's insurgent campaign, and the story of the Democratic nomination battle that spring was the story of the McCarthy–Robert Kennedy duel in the primaries.

Obama is not likely to withdraw from the race — nor does he appear likely to drop Vice President Joe Biden from the ticket — so the prelude to the Democratic convention next year probably will be quite different from what it was in 1968.

But I believe the most striking similarities are to be found on the Republican side.

All along, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination was Richard Nixon, the former vice president who had been beaten in a close race for the presidency eight years earlier and then had lost a race for governor of California two years later. Nixon had a reputation as a conservative anti–communist, which he toned down in pursuit of the 1968 nomination.

And, as he positioned himself in the party's center, he turned back all challengers, one by one.

First, there was Mitt Romney's father, George, whose candidacy collapsed after he famously claimed he had been "brainwashed" into supporting the war. Romney was ridiculed for the remark and wound up dropping out of the race before the New Hampshire primary.

Nixon's next challenger was New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, a darling of the antiwar wing of the Republican Party who emerged as its champion with a write–in campaign in New Hampshire.

Rocky did defeat Nixon in the Massachusetts primary, but, for the most part, his bid for the nomination was ineffective.

In the spring of 1968 — after the shooting of Martin Luther King and before the shooting of Bobby Kennedy — Nixon's fellow Californian, Gov. Ronald Reagan, was his next challenger.

At that time, Reagan was not the experienced executive he was when he was nominated in 1980. The 1968 Reagan had two years of experience as governor, which didn't really compare to Nixon's political record of more than two decades, yet he defeated Nixon in the California primary. Thanks to his margin there, Reagan finished the primaries (which were not nearly as widespread as they are today) with a slight edge over Nixon in the national popular vote.

But Nixon went to the convention a handful of delegates shy of securing the nomination. Reagan and Rockefeller reportedly were going to join forces in a final effort to deny Nixon the nomination, but neither would agree to endorse the other.

When all was said and done, Nixon won by a wide margin on the first ballot — and went on to win the presidency by a narrow margin in a three–candidate race that fall.

While the manner in which Nixon's rivals fell was not the same as it has been for Romney's, I find the parallels between 1968 and 2012 compelling.

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Fourth-Best President Ever?

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"I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president — with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR and Lincoln — just in terms of what we've gotten done in modern history."

Barack Obama
60 Minutes interview

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My, someone certainly has a high opinion of himself and his place in American history.

I didn't watch the president's recent interview on CBS' 60 Minutes, but, apparently, in a segment that was not aired originally, he claimed that his administration's "legislative and foreign policy accomplishments" were as good or better than any other "with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR and Lincoln."

As I have said here before, I'm something of an amateur historian. I minored in history when I was in college, and I have always had an interest in the American presidency and American politics in general.

I'm also a journalist. That was my major in college, and it is the subject I am teaching now. I was trained to write and to think in Associated Press style, which constantly strives for clarity and consistency. So, when a president compares his presidency to "Johnson, FDR and Lincoln," my question is, "Which Johnson?"

The statement, you see, is imprecise. There have been two presidents named Johnson. I'm pretty sure I know which one Obama meant — Lyndon, who succeeded John Kennedy nearly 50 years ago, not Andrew, who succeeded Lincoln nearly 150 years ago.

Until the Clinton presidency, Andrew Johnson was the only president to face an impeachment trial in the Senate — where he was acquitted by a single vote. He chose not to seek a full term on his own in 1868.

A Siena College survey that was released in July 2010 rated Andrew Johnson as one of the five worst presidents in American history.

No, I'm quite sure Barack Obama did not mean to compare himself to that President Johnson. His image has undergone some changes in a century and a half, but, in recent years, he has been remembered as a "white supremacist."

I'm convinced the first black president in American history does not want to be remembered as comparable to Andrew Johnson.

Lyndon Johnson, on the other hand, is almost a Lincoln–like figure for American blacks — and he was responsible for the most advancements — in housing, education, employment opportunities, voting rights, in fact rights in general — for blacks and all other underprivileged Americans.

But LBJ, as I wrote about a month ago, had the misfortune of being a president who wanted to do great things domestically (which he did) but served at a time when foreign affairs dominated.

I wrote that Obama appears likely to turn out to be LBJ in reverse — a president who first ran for the presidency because he wanted to end a war and wound up being undone by his inability to tame the economy.

In addition to teaching journalism, I have also been teaching basic writing, and one of the things I try to impress on my students is the importance of using the right word to express the right thought.

That isn't an easy thing for most people — even people who earn their livings (or who have earned their livings) as writers struggle at times to find the right word. I know I do. Most of the time, I keep a thesaurus within arm's reach whenever I sit down to write — and there are still times when I choose the wrong word.

Nor is it easy to select the right word when one is being interviewed without some notes or a TelePrompTer to help. Consequently, I do have some sympathy for Obama. I have seen many people "misspeak" (to use a word that was particularly popular during the Watergate days) in such a setting.

But this wasn't the first time Obama has been interviewed by someone. Far from it. He is no novice when it comes to being interviewed. He just has a tendency to stick his foot in his mouth when he does.

When Obama suggests that his presidency is the best in history "with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR and Lincoln," I really have to marvel at his use of the word "possible" and what it implies.

In hindsight, Obama himself might admit that it wasn't the most prudent word choice he could have made, but I believe it speaks volumes about what he really thinks of himself and his presidency.

I think he really does believe his presidency, in its first two years, accomplished more than any other president — but he will allow for the possibility that LBJ, FDR and Lincoln accomplished more.

Lincoln is kind of a no–brainer. The Siena survey listed him third, and most surveys rank Lincoln in the top three.

FDR was the top–rated president in Siena's survey, which is also kind of a no–brainer. The only president to be elected four times, he guided the country through its worst economic crisis ever and is credited with leading it through World War II even though he died a few weeks before hostilities ended in Europe.

But Siena's survey did not rank LBJ in its Top 10. Apparently, Obama holds him in much higher esteem than most historians — at least the ones who were surveyed.

They ranked Theodore Roosevelt second. Roosevelt is remembered for several achievements — trust busting, conservation, labor laws, public health and safety laws — that continue to influence American life.

T.R. was the first American to receive the Nobel Prize — but, unlike Obama, he was rewarded for an actual achievement (negotiating the resolution of the Russo–Japanese War), not merely for his potential. By his omission from Obama's statement, though, it appears the president thinks his accomplishments in his first two years were greater than Roosevelt's.

The survey listed George Washington as the fourth–best president, and that should be a no–brainer, too. He is remembered as the father of the country, its first president. Thanks to his selflessness (he declined the salary that was offered to him, preferring not to tarnish, in any way, his image as a public servant) and his insistence that the leader of the new country should not be a monarch, we call our presidents "Mr. President," not "Your Highness."

It set the tone for the last 200 years, but I can only conclude that Obama also believes his contributions to American life in his first two years as president are greater than Washington's.

The Siena survey ranked Thomas Jefferson fifth. Once again, that should be a no–brainer, shouldn't it? Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, and there are few documents in recorded history that have had the kind of influence on a culture that it has had.

Jefferson also was responsible for the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the United States at that time — and still represents roughly one–third of its land mass.

But, apparently, Obama feels his accomplishments in his first two years exceeded Jefferson's.

Sixth in Siena's survey was Jefferson's successor, James Madison. Before becoming president, he was the "Father of the Constitution." As president, he sought to continue Jefferson's policies, but he may be largely remembered for the crumbling of U.S.–British relations and the War of 1812, during which the White House, the Capitol and many other public buildings were burned.

Seventh in the rankings was Madison's successor, James Monroe, whose signature achievement probably was the Monroe Doctrine, which established the Western Hemisphere as the United States' sphere of influence and served notice to Europe that any attempt by any of its nations to interfere would be seen as an act of aggression and treated appropriately.

Ironically, America has not re–elected three consecutive presidents since Monroe's re–election in 1820. If Obama wins a second term next year, he would match Monroe's electoral achievement — but, apparently, he believes he has already bested Monroe as a president.

Siena's eighth–ranked president was Woodrow Wilson, a leader of the progressive movement. A Wilson biographer, John M. Cooper, wrote that Wilson's record of legislative achievement, which included child labor reform, the Federal Trade Commission Act and the Federal Farm Loan Act — was unmatched by any other president except FDR, and his advocacy of women's suffrage helped lead to the ratification of the 19th Amendment.

Perhaps it is subliminally, but Obama seems to think that what he did as president in 2009 and 2010 is greater than what Wilson achieved nearly a century earlier.

Ninth on the list was Harry Truman, whose low point in his approval ratings (22) was unmatched by any president until Obama's immediate predecessor, George W. Bush.

But that doesn't tell the whole story of Truman's presidency. From the day he succeeded FDR in April 1945 until he won the 1948 election, Truman did great things in spite of the fact that he had been virtually ignored by Roosevelt in his 82 days as vice president.

He knew nothing of the Manhattan Project, which gave him the weapon that he used to bring the war in the Pacific to a quick conclusion. The attitudes about his use of nuclear weapons in 1945 have changed over the years, but at the time and for years thereafter, it was believed to have saved hundreds of thousands who, it was said, would have perished in a fight–to–the–death invasion of Japan.

He had to deal with the transition from a wartime economy to a peacetime one, which always seems to be uneasy but was especially so after World War II. There were several economic conflicts that had gone unaddressed during the war years but boiled over when the war ended; Truman managed to deal with them all.

He was an advocate of the "Fair Deal," national health insurance and civil rights.

I would guess that Obama has quite a bit of respect for what Truman did as president — so much that he is clearly trying to duplicate Truman's "upset" victory in his re–election campaign in 1948. Truman won a full term largely by running against a "do–nothing Congress," and that seems to be Obama's strategy as well.

For that to work, you need a solid record of achievement to contrast with Congress'. Obama clearly believes he does, and so do his adoring supporters, but, judging from presidential approval ratings, millions are not convinced.

They are not convinced for much the same reason that the people of the late 1960s were not convinced about LBJ. They felt out of sync with their president's priorities. He was focused on domestic issues, which were (and are) important, but they were more concerned about the meat grinder of Vietnam.

In modern times, Obama's highest approval ratings have been for his handling of foreign affairs — when Americans are hurting at home, struggling to keep a roof over their heads and food in their stomachs. They need jobs.

The Siena survey ranked Dwight Eisenhower 10th. Eisenhower earned Americans' respect when he led the Allies to victory over the Axis powers in World War II, and he presided over a country that was at peace in the world but suffering from some postwar growing pains in the 1950s.

His most lasting legacy, I suppose, is the interstate highway system — and his warning, in the final days of his presidency, against the growing influence of the "military–industrial complex."

Both continue to influence American life, but Obama thinks his achievements are equal to or greater than Eisenhower's.

Maybe they are, but that will be up to the voters to decide next year.

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Georgia On My Mind

I have this friend who lives in Atlanta. I would describe him as a devoted supporter of Barack Obama.

He says he has been disappointed and frustrated with Obama at times, but it often seems to me that he finds ways to justify or excuse those policies that he says have been disappointing and frustrating. This also leads, at times, to overly optimistic electoral expectations.

At one time, we were living parallel lives. We were pursuing our master's degrees in journalism at the University of North Texas, we were working full time at the same newspaper, and we were working part time as graduate assistants in UNT's editing lab.

Frequently, we were enrolled in the same classes. I used to tease him that I saw more of him than his wife or children did.

We got to know each other pretty well, and we found that we had a lot in common. We both considered ourselves Democrats, and we shared much the same world view.

Anyway, that friend and I went our separate ways eventually. He got his degree, and I got mine. He went on to get his doctorate at another school. I got a job teaching journalism. We had our different life experiences, as friends do.

To an extent, we've moved in different directions. He still considers himself a Democrat; I consider myself an independent. I guess his philosophy hasn't changed much; perhaps mine has, although I don't think of it that way.

But even if it is true, I don't look at it as a bad thing — more like what Joni Mitchell described in "Both Sides Now."

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"But now old friends are acting strange,
They shake their heads,
They say I've changed.
Something's lost
But something's gained
In living every day."

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Life has taken my friend to Atlanta, as I say — where, I presumed, he would obtain unique insights into the voting behavior of people in Georgia.

Maybe he has, but I'm inclined to think they are colored by his personal political perceptions, not necessarily by reality.

In 2008, he told me that Obama would win Georgia for two reasons — the black population of Georgia (roughly 30% of the total) would vote heavily for him (which it did, I suppose) and the presence of Libertarian — and Georgia native — Bob Barr on the ballot.

Barr, he said, would siphon off enough votes from John McCain to hand the state to the Democrats. He didn't.

More than 3.9 million people voted in Georgia in November 2008. About 28,000 of them voted for Barr.

That didn't really surprise me. Georgia has never struck me as being unusually susceptible to quixotic third–party candidacies.

When such a third–party candidate has caught fire elsewhere, in the region or the country at large — i.e., Ross Perot in '92 or George Wallace in '68 — Georgia has jumped right in there.

But, otherwise, third–party candidates have been non–factors in Georgia. Maybe the concept of a two–party system is too deeply ingrained in Georgians.

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As someone who has lived in the South all his life, that sort of seems to me to be true of the South in general, and the percentages from the last election in which a third–party candidate played a prominent role — 1992 — support that.

According to "The Almanac of American Politics 1994," states in the South Atlantic region of the country (Florida, Georgia, Virginia and the Carolinas) gave a much smaller share of their vote to Perot (16%) than almost any other region. The states in the Mississippi Valley — Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee — gave the smallest (11%).

In other words, even in a year in which the third–party candidate was bringing millions of previously politically inactive voters into the process, the South resisted the temptation to abandon the two–party arrangement.

The authors of the 1994 "Almanac," Michael Barone and Grant Ujifusa, used the numbers from the 1992 election to make the case for their observation of the "phenomenon" of straight–ticket voting that year. And I suppose it was a compelling argument for those who sought to explain what had happened that year.

Their analysis always struck me as being somewhat short–sighted, focused as it was on a single election.

See, I never really bought the idea that it was an isolated phenomenon. I have long believed that straight–ticket voting is a reality of American politics, particularly Southern politics. It was true in 1992. I believe it will be true in 2012 — and that the numbers from 2010 and recent presidential elections clearly suggest that the Democrats will lose every Southern state next year.

I know it was always a reality in Arkansas — but that was due, in large part, to the fact that there was really only one political party in Arkansas when I was growing up. The Democrats had a near monopoly on political power in Arkansas — and most of the South — in those days.

But that was really a different Democratic Party. As I have noted before, the politicians who led the Democratic Party in those days probably had much more in common philosophically with today's Republicans.

Eventually, in fact, many of them switched their party affiliations, but it took some time. The Southern Democrats of a generation or two back were trained at their mother's knees to be wary of Republicans.

Republicans were damn yankees, and the transition was a long time coming and really achieved incrementally. Southerners were voting for Republicans for president long before they started voting for Republicans for state and local offices.

The GOP, they were told, had inflicted Reconstruction on the South after the Civil War — and had been responsible for the poverty and misery that afflicted most who lived there, white and black, ever since. It was an article of faith, and so, with the exceptions of a few isolated pockets, most places in the South were run by Democrats for decades.

Many people mistakenly believe the South began moving away from the Democrats to the Republicans in 1980, when Reagan conservatives joined forces with Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority, but, in hindsight, that was really more symbolic of the completion of the shift than its beginning. It was in 1980 that the Moral Majority served as the bridge for the last holdouts, the Christian evangelicals, who seemed, prior to that time, to exist outside politics — at least as an interest group or voting bloc.

The real breaking point came in the 1960s, in the midst of the civil rights conflict, campus unrest and general social upheaval. Even Lyndon Johnson, the architect of the Great Society, acknowledged that his greatest legislative triumphs, the ones that guaranteed voting rights and civil rights to all Americans, likely had handed the South to the opposition for a generation or more.

His words have truly been prophetic. Of the 11 elections that have been held since Johnson won by historic proportions in 1964, the Democratic nominee has lost every Southern state in six of them — and has only come close to sweeping the region once (in 1976) even though the party has nominated Southerners for president five times.

Most Southern states have voted for the Republican nominee for president even in years when Republicans were struggling elsewhere ... even in years when native Southerners were on the Democrats' national ticket.

I have always had mixed feelings about the fierce loyalty of Southerners. I have often felt it was more a point of pride, of not wanting to admit when one has been wrong, than a point of principle.

When Southerners give their hearts to someone, it is usually for life. Likewise, when the South gives its allegiance to a person or a political party, it is a long–term commitment — in spite of the behavior of some philandering politicians.

Giving up on a relationship — be it social or political — is a last resort for most Southerners. It is what you do when all else has failed.

(Regarding the dissolution of social/legal relationships, I have always suspected that attitude has more to do with the regional stigma about divorce that still persists, to an extent, today and the reluctance of many Southerners to legally admit a mistake was made than any theological concerns about promises made to a higher power.)

That's probably the main reason why it was so surprising when Obama won the states of Virginia and North Carolina in 2008. Virginia hadn't voted for a Democrat since LBJ's day. North Carolina voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976 but had been in the Republican column ever since.

For those states to vote for a Democrat after regularly voting for Republicans for years was an admission that could not have been easy for many of the voters in those states to make.

Numerically, it seems to have come a little easier to Virginians, who supported the Obama–Biden ticket by nearly 250,00 votes out of more than 3.7 million cast. North Carolinians, on the other hand, barely voted for Obama, giving him a winning margin of less than 15,000 votes out of 4.3 million.

I'm not really sure what this means for 2012. I mean, the 2008 results can't be explained strictly in racial terms, can they? The white share of the population is about the same in both states (64.8% in Virginia, 65.3% in North Carolina), and the black populations are comparable as well (19.0% in Virginia, 21.2% in North Carolina).

If anything, one would expect that a higher black population (along with half a million more participants) would produce a higher margin for Obama in North Carolina than Virginia — but the opposite was true.

What can be said with certainty is that both states voted Republican — heavily — in the 2010 congressional midterms.

• North Carolina re–elected Republican Sen. Richard Burr with 55% of the vote. That's pretty high for North Carolina. Statewide races frequently are much closer.
  
  North Carolina Republicans also captured a House seat from the Democrats.


• Virginia elected Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell in the off–year election of 2009, providing perhaps the first glimpse of what was to come.
  
  Neither of the state's senators was on the ballot in 2010, but Democratic Sen. Jim Webb, who defeated George Allen in the 2006 midterm election, announced earlier this year that he would not seek a second term. Ostensibly, his reason is that he wants to return to the private sector, but I can't help wondering if he has concluded that he caught lightning in a bottle six years ago and cannot duplicate the feat in 2012.
  
  Virginia Republicans grabbed three House seats from Democrats in 2010.

It was less surprising that Florida voted for Obama in 2008.

That's understandable. For quite awhile, Florida has been a melting pot for retirees from all over the nation so its politics tends to be quite different from just about any other Southern state. Until the advent of air conditioning, Florida was mostly a backwater kind of place with a population to match, but in recent decades, the only thing that has truly been Southern about Florida is its geographic location.

In many ways, its diverse population bears watching as an election year unfolds. It may be the closest thing to a political barometer, a cross–section of the American public, that one is likely to find.

The scene of an excruciating recount in 2000, Florida has now been on the winning side in 11 of the previous 12 elections — and conditions in 2008 were probably more favorable for the out–of–power party than at any other time that I can remember.

More than perhaps any other state in the region, Florida's vote seems likely to be influenced by prevailing conditions in November 2012. Obama won the state with 51% of the vote in 2008, but, again, few solid conclusions can be reached based on the racial composition of the electorate. Whites represent a smaller share of the population in Florida (about 58%) than in in Virginia or North Carolina.

But the black vote in Florida is also smaller (around 15%).

In fact, half again as many Floridians are Hispanic (more than 22%), and, while those voters will be affected by economic conditions like anyone else, they may also be sensitive to immigration issues and particularly responsive to proposed solutions to those problems.

There may well be compelling reasons for Hispanic voters to feel overly encouraged or discouraged by U.S. immigration policy under Obama.

What can be said of voting behavior in Florida in 2010 is that Florida's voters made a right turn.

Republicans seized four House seats from Democrats, elected one of the original tea partiers to the U.S. Senate and replaced an outgoing Republican governor with another Republican governor.

There has been persistent talk, in fact, that the senator — Marco Rubio — will be the GOP running mate, no matter who the presidential nominee turns out to be.

And if that turns out to be true, the party really will be over in Florida ...

... and elsewhere in the South.

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Hoosier Buddy?

In the ongoing countdown to next year's election, there are 344 days to go until the votes are counted on Nov. 6, 2012.

That's 49 weeks from tomorrow.

Just think of all the things that will be determined — one way or another — between now and that night 49 weeks from tomorrow night.

In spite of that, though, there are a few things that can be taken for granted.

It is generally assumed, for example, that Barack Obama will receive his party's nomination. No challenger has emerged; in fact, no Democrat, prominent or otherwise, is even said to be considering a challenge.

Diehard Democrats have been saying for months that the absence of competition for the nomination is a good sign. Jimmy Carter was challenged for his party's nomination in 1980, they have pointed out, and went on to lose the general election. Bill Clinton, on the other hand, was not seriously challenged for his party's nomination in 1996 — and easily won a second term.

No challenger means Obama doesn't have to spend campaign resources on his pursuit of the nomination. He can hold the funds for the fall campaign, when he can concentrate on winning the battleground states and the states that he carried last time that Democrats rarely win — and he can start slinging mud, as an incumbent with an unemployment rate as high as the one in America today must (and, inevitably, will) do, at whoever is leading in the polls this week.

That wasn't Lyndon Johnson's problem. LBJ's nomination was never in doubt, but he did have some modest opposition. Primaries didn't play the pivotal role in the nominating process in 1964 that they do today, but there were a few, and Alabama Gov. George Wallace challenged Johnson — and did astonishingly well — in some primaries in Northern states.

In those primaries, historian Theodore H. White wrote in "The Making of the President 1964," Wallace sought "to test whether racism could magnetize votes in the North as well as the South."

In Indiana, Wisconsin and Maryland, Wallace got his answer.

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"Wallace astounded political observers not so much by the percentage of votes he could draw for simple bigotry (34 percent of the Democratic vote in Wisconsin, 30 percent in Indiana, 43 percent in Maryland) as by the groups from whom he drew his votes. For he demonstrated pragmatically and for the first time the fear that white working–class Americans have of Negroes. ... in the mill town of Gary, Indiana, he actually carried every white precinct in the city among Democratic voters ..."

Theodore H. White
The Making of the President 1964

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Barring the most wildly improbable of developments, Obama will be the Democrats' standard bearer in 2012. No suspense there.

But the identity of Obama's opponent remains a mystery, and no one knows what the economy will be like when people go to the polls next fall.

So there is some suspense as America prepares for the start of the primary/caucus season.

The conventional wisdom is that people make up their minds about a presidency, not necessarily a president, about six months before an election. And, while today's Democrats would like to think that people will make their voting decision based on whether they like Obama on a personal level, the fact is that liking an incumbent and approving of the job he has done are two entirely different things.

It does help if voters like the president, and survey after survey shows that Americans tend to like Obama personally. But those same surveys show that most Americans think the country is going in the wrong direction.

That can be decisive in places where the outcome is in doubt — in the modern–day battleground states, where many voters may feel torn between the fact that they like Obama but don't like where they think the country is headed.

For many reasons, I feel safe in predicting that the Republican nominee — whoever that turns out to be — will win Indiana next year.

Indiana was an unexpected bonus for Democrats on Election Day 2008. The state votes for a Democrat about once in a generation — if that. Obama's victory there was the first for a Democratic presidential nominee in 44 years.

If Johnson hadn't carried Indiana in 1964, Obama would have been the first Democrat in his lifetime to carry the state.

LBJ was the only Democrat to carry Indiana in the lifetime of Obama's mother. She was born in 1942, and the last Democrat to carry Indiana before Johnson was Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936.

Indiana voted for FDR in 1932, too. It took something as big as the Great Depression to get Indiana to vote Democratic in consecutive elections. Before the 1930s, the last time Indiana voted Democratic in consecutive elections was in the years just before the outbreak of the Civil War — in the middle of the 19th century.

Indiana did vote Democratic four times in the 20th century. In addition to LBJ's 1964 landslide and FDR's landslides of 1932 and 1936, Woodrow Wilson won the state in 1912 — when Republicans were divided between President William Howard Taft and former President Theodore Roosevelt.

If the Republicans had been united that year and either Taft or Roosevelt had been their nominee, their share of the vote combined would have exceeded Wilson's by nearly 35,000 out of more than 650,000 cast — a narrow margin, sure, but more substantial than the margin in Indiana for the Republican running against Wilson when he sought re–election four years later.

When he wrote about Johnson's landslide nearly 50 years ago, White also wrote about patterns he detected in the election returns, including the "ripples and bubbles of protest" spawned by the civil rights movement and the general racial unrest across the nation.

Such "ripples and bubbles," White wrote, were so hard to spot that one was forced to "pore over charts to find them." But he did observe evidence that the Democrats, as LBJ himself would say the following year, were handing the South to the Republicans for half a century.

The South, White wrote, showed "significant" declines in Democratic support, and those declines clearly continued in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, through good years and bad years for both parties.

I guess it wasn't hard to identify that trend in the South in 1964. Five states in the Deep South voted Republican — some heavily — and the ones that remained in the Democratic column, as they had for generations, did so by much narrower margins than ever before, even when popular Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower were on the ballot.

Almost no other states, even traditionally Republican ones, voted against Johnson in 1964. Nevertheless, White identified some ethnic "ripples and bubbles" in some northern states like Indiana — "Polish working–class wards" where the Republicans "managed to shave the Democratic percentages" in spite of the fact that it was an overwhelmingly Democratic year.

White acknowledged that he could not determine "whether this was an echo of backlash" or "ethnic identification" with the Republican running mate's Polish–American wife.

But the next 10 presidential elections suggested that Indiana's support for the Democrat in 1964 was an aberration, not the start of political realignment there.

And there is no reason to believe that Obama's victory there in 2008 was a realignment, either. His coattails weren't just short in Indiana, they were nonexistent. While Obama was winning a squeaker (50% to 49%) against John McCain with the help of young and minority voters in the cities, the Republican governor was being re–elected with 58% of the vote.

In 2010, Republican Dan Coats, who spent a decade in the U.S. Senate previously, was elected the state's junior senator with 55% of the vote. Six of the state's nine House districts elected Republicans, most of them with more than 60% of the vote.

Indiana&apo;s roots are planted deep in Republican soil, and its support for the Democrat in 2008 was an aberration. Any state–by–state prediction for 2012 that suggests that Obama will retain Indiana can be dismissed as unreliable.

On the evening of Nov. 6, 2012, Indiana is likely to be one of the first states projected for the Republican nominee.

You can take it to the bank.

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The LBJ Factor

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I've watched the rapid descent of the popular image of Barack Obama since he took the oath of office.

And I've been intrigued by his apparent public evolution — from the early days of his presidency, when he was widely seen as the reincarnation of Lincoln, Washington and/or FDR, to the recent comparisons between the president and (at best) Bill Clinton following his party's disastrous losses in the 1994 midterms or (at worst) Jimmy Carter's one–term administration.

No one knows with absolute certainty what will happen between now and next November; consequently, no one knows if the voters will deny a second term to Obama or if they will re–elect him with a rousing vote of confidence.

Thus, all these comparisons — while each has certain valid points — are based largely on self–serving speculation.

Republicans would like everyone to believe we are witnessing Carter Redux — because that would mean we are on the brink of the ascendance of another Reagan.

Democrats would like everyone to believe that, in spite of criticism of Obama, we are witnessing a reprise of the Clinton years — and, in 2012, will see a reinvigorated president win a second term by approximately the same margin in the Electoral College that elected him the first time.

Time will tell if either scenario is correct — or if an entirely new paradigm is being written.

My money is on the latter — because, while history truly does repeat itself, it never seems to do things exactly the way it did before. Times change.

In other words, we might be witnessing a Republican resurgence similar to the one that overwhelmed Carter and the Democrats in 1980 — but it might not necessarily produce another Ronald Reagan.

And, even if it did, the times are different. This isn't like a TV rerun (outside of syndication, do they still do that anymore?) — or even a remake. The people would be different. The circumstances — and, hence, the decisions they must make — would be different.

Perhaps the differences would be subtle. Perhaps they wouldn't be so subtle.

Likewise, we could be witnessing another rebound of an embattled Democratic president whose party suffered massive midterm losses (or perhaps, as some Democrats have been suggesting with fondness, another "Dewey Defeats Truman" election in which the incumbent scores a completely unexpected victory), but it doesn't necessarily mean that Obama's second term would be more successful than his first.

(Actually, second terms often seem to be worse than the first. It's worth remembering that Truman's popularity really began to sink irreversibly after his inauguration in 1949, and, while Clinton was re–elected two years after the GOP seized both chambers of Congress, his second term was largely mired in his impeachment defense.)

At the moment, if I am inclined to compare Obama to anyone, it is Lyndon Johnson. I see several similarities/parallels between the two presidents.

At what may be the most basic level, Johnson was the last Democrat to carry states like Virginia and Indiana — until Obama in 2008 (Carter was the only other Democrat to win North Carolina; Carter and Clinton were the only other Democrats to carry Florida).

Both Johnson and Obama won landslide victories in the Electoral College — but so did Clinton (twice). He just didn't receive a majority of the popular vote.

Voting patterns, like poll results, are not infallible indicators of what to expect — but they do provide a certain amount of guidance in the right direction.

It is not in the voting patterns, though, that I see the most striking similarities between Obama and LBJ. It's in their priorities as president — and the public's response, via its approval ratings.

One could say many things about LBJ — and, without a doubt, most, if not all, the good and the bad, were true — but one that is absolutely undeniably true is that he was a great admirer of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

And LBJ wanted to leave his mark on domestic policy — as he believed FDR had. He wanted to exceed what his idol had accomplished.

Oh, sure, there were contemporaries of Roosevelt who would tell you that his skill in foreign affairs was evident in his handling of American participation in World War II — both before and after America officially entered the conflict.

But you can still see his hand behind many of the programs and policies that were created to battle the Great Depression of the 1930s — and still exist today.

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LBJ was raised in poverty. Such conditions strongly (and, often, adversely) affect how a man approaches the issues and relationships in his later life, and LBJ earnestly wanted to eliminate poverty. He appreciated FDR's courage in the face of a savage economy, which he witnessed as a young man in Texas and then as a member of the House. "[Roosevelt] was the one person I ever knew, anywhere, who was never afraid," he said after FDR's death in 1945.

When LBJ became president, his #1 goal was to expand on FDR's New Deal with his "Great Society."

And when he won a full term on his own — with a share of the popular vote that surpassed anything that Roosevelt ever received — it was seen by many as an endorsement of his domestic agenda, whether it really was or not.

That part probably was irrelevant because the times forced the American people — as the times so often do — to re–focus their attention.

In the 1960s, that meant Vietnam.

It may have been Johnson's misfortune to become president right when fate made foreign affairs the topic that was increasingly of the most concern to Americans, but presidents don't get to choose what kind of world exists when they are in office.

When LBJ won by a landslide in 1964, Vietnam was still a faraway land that most Americans knew nothing about. The campaign did not focus on foreign policy, but, before long, Americans were dying at a terrifying pace in the jungles of Southeast Asia, and the Johnson administration seemed powerless to do anything about it.

Much may stem from the fact that Johnson's military experience was so limited. Born in 1908, he was too young to serve in World War I, and his early life was influenced by poverty, not the battlefield.

When America entered World War II, Johnson was in Congress. He became a commissioned officer in the Naval Reserve and asked for a combat assignment but was sent to inspect stateside shipyards instead. The closest he came to actual combat was his short–term assignment to a three–man observation team that was sent to look into conditions in the Southwest Pacific.

Two years after Johnson won more than 60% of the popular vote and about 90% of the electoral vote, his Democrats suffered a severe setback in the midterm election, losing 47 House seats. The war had been escalating and, in spite of his efforts to combat poverty, Johnson's domestic agenda didn't seem to be all that successful, either — with race riots occurring from coast to coast.

(Interestingly, one of the freshman Republicans elected to the House in 1966 was George H.W. Bush, the future president and father of another.)

LBJ's popularity dropped sharply, so sharply that, even though he could have run for another term in 1968, he decided not to.

It must have been a disappointing — not to mention dizzying — decline for LBJ. I really believe he wanted to be remembered as a great domestic president — and instead he was consumed by an ugly little war in Vietnam.

LBJ probably benefited enormously from the sympathy and good will of Americans following the assassination of President Kennedy. His popularity never dropped below 60 — and often was much higher — in his first two years as president — but then began its perilous decline in 1966 after Johnson said U.S. troops should remain in Vietnam until Communist aggression had been stopped there.

And when a president's approval numbers go in the tank and stay there for awhile, my experience is that it is really hard to pull them out.

We'll never know if Johnson could have overcome those numbers. By the end of April 1966, a quarter of a million American troops were in Vietnam, and Johnson's approval rating dropped below 50 for the first — but far from the last — time. Less than two years later, he dropped out of the race for the 1968 Democratic nomination.

Fast forward 40 years.

Obama is kind of Lyndon Johnson in reverse — at least when it comes to his policy preference. He wasn't interested in domestic policy. He certainly wasn't interested — or experienced — in economics. He wanted to be a foreign affairs president.

I'm not really sure what drove him to focus on foreign policy. Critics would say it was the political angle, that it was the topic everyone wanted to talk about in 2008. But I think it goes deeper than that.

He never served in the armed forces — but that isn't unusual for people in his age range or younger. Selective service was stopped at the conclusion of the Vietnam War, then registration resumed in 1980, but it's been an all–volunteer service ever since. The most Obama was obliged to do by law was register for a nonexistent draft after he turned 18.

Maybe it has something to do with the multicultural environments in which he grew up. Perhaps it is rooted in his biracial parentage. Whatever the influence was, he specialized in international relations when he studied political science at Columbia University in the early 1980s.

Clearly, that interest was there long before it may have been expedient for a presidential campaign. And it was reflected in his Senate committee assignments when he announced his intention to seek the presidency — Foreign Relations, Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs, Veterans Affairs.

And recent polls suggest that it is one of the few areas in which Americans tend to give him positive marks.

But the times don't call for a foreign affairs president.

That doesn't mean foreign affairs isn't important. It is always important, and, most of the time, the need for an international leader is sudden and unexpected — after all, even with Osama bin Laden gone, who knows when or if another 9–11 will occur?

But poll after poll after poll reports that the voters are overwhelmingly concerned about pocketbook issues, and Obama brought no practical experience in that to the White House. When Obama entered the 2008 race, the unemployment rate was about half what it is today. There were — as there always are — economic naysayers who claimed that this policy or that one would lead the country to ruin.

No one really took that kind of talk seriously when Obama launched his seemingly quixotic campaign in February 2007. In fact, the other Democrats who were lining up to run for the 2008 nomination — including Obama — were intent upon foreign policy, too — specifically, ending American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But once again, fate intervened. In the month before the first primaries and caucuses of the 2008 election season, a recession began. It wasn't clear to most Americans how severe things would get, how many jobs would be lost in the months ahead, but a recession had begun that would gather momentum and plunge America into an abyss.

The frustration has grown.

Obama isn't going to bow out of the race the way LBJ did. I don't think he is that pragmatic. He probably still thinks he can win — and maybe he can. But I strongly doubt it.

In the early days of his presidency, polls showed Obama's approval in the 60s, but, with the exception of a brief uptick following the death of Osama bin Laden, his ratings have been below 50 in most surveys for a couple of years now.

The numbers aren't quite as bad as LBJ's — and they are comparable to Clinton's — but I can't help but think that, even if Obama fights it out to the end, he faces essentially the same fate as LBJ.

Perhaps their mutual legacy is that they and the times in which they served were mismatched.

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The Wimp Factor

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I'm not really sure when "wimp" was introduced into presidential politics.

I suppose the concept has been around for a long time. The word "wimp" brings to mind a cowardly person, a poor leader, and that is something that I am sure has always been a concern for the voters — but there must have been other words for it.

"Wimp" is a term from the late 20th century, and it seems to conjure up images of appeasement — British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and the Munich Agreement in the 1930s, for instance, but I don't think "wimp" was a synonym for coward in those days.

(There was, at the time, a character in the Popeye cartoons named "Wimpy" who was always trying to borrow money to buy a hamburger — but I doubt that he had much to do with the terminology in political campaigns.)

Today, the word "wimpy" tends to be associated with Democratic politicians.

I bring this up because the word "wimp" came to mind today when I was reading a Gallup report that said Americans were less likely to see Barack Obama as a strong leader now than they were when he took office.

This "stands in contrast to the stability in the trend for two other personal dimensions," says Gallup. Those two dimensions are concerned with his ability to empathize with his fellow Americans and whether he shares the values of his constituents.

In truth, Obama's standing in all three categories has declined since he took office, but the decline has been much more pronounced in his perception as a strong, decisive leader — and Democrats seem to have chosen to "accentuate the positive," as the old song says.

There has been less movement in the public's perception of Obama as being able to empathize with their problems or whether he shares their values. Hence, those ratings appear relatively stable.

And much of the emphasis that I have heard from Democrats who have been promoting the re–election of the president has centered on those two things — he understands what you're up against and he believes the same things you do.

At first glance, that might seem like a logical approach. But I believe it is the wrong approach to take. The poll numbers suggest that there has not been much movement in either of those categories. Those attitudes are set, and there is little to be gained. Those who disagree that Obama understands what they face every day or that he shares their values are in the minority, but they have felt that way all along.

There has been a lot of movement, however, on the question of whether Obama is a strong leader. People may think that you empathize with their problems and that you share their values, but if they think you aren't a strong leader, you might as well start packing your things.

The situation should be even more alarming for Obama because he has fallen from such heights. When he became president, Gallup reports, nearly three–quarters of Americans saw him as a strong leader. A year later, that rating was down to 60% and, today, it is down to 52%.

The growing crisis in the Middle East, along with the higher gas prices it has spawned, may force Obama to do things he doesn't want to do. It may alienate him from some on the far left. It might even lead to a challenge within Obama's party.

But the alternative is to risk being labeled a "wimp," and that has not been a good thing for Democrats in the past.

When I was a child, many Democrats in Congress were considered "hawks" because they supported Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam policy. That was a tough image, especially when compared with the equivalent term that was used for opponents of the Vietnam policy — "doves."

More and more, Democrats in general got a reputation for being doves, for being weak, indecisive, easily pushed around. I don't think it started in the 1960s.

I was pretty young during the 1968 campaign, and the Democratic nominee that year, Hubert Humphrey, had been LBJ's vice president. He was held accountable for Johnson's unpopular Vietnam policy, which could hardly be described as "wimpy."

It might have gotten its start when George McGovern was the party's nominee in 1972. But it wasn't mentioned much (if at all) in 1976, when Jimmy Carter was nominated for the first time. His opponent, President Ford, had his own problems trying to convince the voters that he hadn't made a deal with the man he succeeded and later pardoned, Richard Nixon.

But, when Carter sought re–election in 1980, the word "wimp" was being used to describe Democrats on a fairly regular basis — and the next couple of standard bearers, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis, resorted to ridiculous measures to try to refute a negative.

Then, I guess, Republicans experienced something of a wimp backlash.

Ironically, it didn't really come in the field of foreign policy. In 1992, George H.W. Bush was on pretty solid ground following Operation Desert Storm.

No, the backlash came over the economy. Bush had gone back on his pledge not to raise taxes, and the economy was in a recession. It was nothing like what Americans have experienced in recent years, but, in the context of recent history, it was unsettling enough.

I have always felt it played more of a role in Bush's defeat that year than Ross Perot's presence on the ballot — no matter how much Republicans wanted to blame Perot.

Thus, I suppose, it can be said that Bush was seen as something of a wimp when it came to domestic issues. The idea was that he was weak and indecisive on economic issues. At the very least, it could be said that he was out of touch.

In the last 20 years, Democrats have appeared increasingly eager to take positions that are in contrast to their unfavorable image. During the Clinton years, the White House often found itself involved in conflicts abroad — and it was not always clear whether American involvement was legitimate.

There were those who contended Clinton was simply using situations to manipulate public opinion. Perhaps he did, at times, but, if he did, he wasn't the first — and no one ever satisfactorily demonstrated that he was guilty of that kind of manipulation, anyway.

Democrats were sensitive to the charge, though. In 1998, when much of the talk about Clinton centered on his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, American plans to strike where Osama bin Laden was believed to be staying were ultimately abandoned for a couple of reasons — in public, the administration said children's toys had been seen in surveillance footage and there were concerns that civilians and their children might be hurt or killed, but, in private, the administration was concerned about public relations and the perception that the actions were intended to divert attention from the president's relationship with an intern.

A few years later, bin Laden put the wimp factor right back on the political map with the September 11 attacks. In 2004, Democrats were so concerned about the need to look strong and decisive that they nominated a Vietnam veteran to run for president — even though, upon his return from southeast Asia, John Kerry made a name for himself speaking out against the war.

In the early 1970s, that was a courageous position for Kerry to take, but, 30 years later, in the aftermath of a coordinated and unprovoked attack on both civilian and military targets in early 21st century America, it was seen as weak, appeasing, compromising.

If it hadn't been for the economic collapse in September 2008, Obama might have had to defend himself against charges of being a wimp as well. His campaign began before the recession did, and, at that time, it was widely expected that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would dominate the 2008 race.

But, instead, the economy dominated, and Obama won, in large part because he was the anti–Bush.

Fast forward about 2½ years. The economy is still struggling, but the Democrats apparently have settled on the updated version of their strategy from 2008. They plan to remind people that it is George W. Bush's fault — unless there is a sudden and, at this point, completely unexpected drop in unemployment, in which case (in keeping with an old American tradition) the administration will take full credit for it.

Perhaps, if you are running for re–election and your economic policies have not improved the situation, that is your only option, your only excuse — especially when your party also enjoyed majorities in Congress that made just about any legislative initiatives possible for roughly six months.

But the Democrats didn't seize their opportunity. That was their fault.

I think it is a mistake to continue to point fingers. It comes across as whining. Part of being a strong leader is being willing to take responsibility when things don't go well.

Americans liked it when John F. Kennedy said, after the Bay of Pigs disaster, "Victory has a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan" and told them he would take responsibility for the setback, even though the plan had been put in motion during his predecessor's presidency — and he had been president for only a few months.

They liked it, too, when Harry Truman put a sign on his desk that said "The Buck Stops Here." They don't like it when presidents pass the buck. And they don't like would–be presidents who seem likely to pass the buck.

They like it when you "feel their pain," as Clinton put it. That was part of George H.W. Bush's problem in 1992. Too many Americans thought he had no clue what life was like for most Americans. And they like it when you share their values.

But they'll trade both of those things for a president who isn't a wimp, who will stand up for America.

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