Clinton, King and Johnson
Photo from USA Today
Unfortunately for Hillary Clinton, some of us are still alive that lived in the ’60s and remember the Civil Rights movement. Last week she tried to make a point that President Johnson was a doer and Martin Luther King, Jr. was only a dreamer. She was trying to compare her record of doing stuff to Obama’s record of not doing stuff when she said;
Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. … It took a president to get it done.
Her comparison of herself to Johnson may have been more appropriate than she might have liked. See, as a Senator, the year Johnson voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1957, just three years before he became Vice President, just seven years before he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Johnson said;
These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. For if we don’t move at all, then their allies will line up against us and there’ll be no way of stopping them, we’ll lose the filibuster and there’ll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation. It’ll be Reconstruction all over again.
So his vote in 1957 and his signature in 1964 was his way of “putting the brakes on all sorts of wild legislation”. It wasn’t for simple human rights, or for living up to our Constitution. It was a way to keep a lid on the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr. It was for political expediency so Johnson and his Democrats could stay in office. It was to maintain the status quo – what Democrats have been doing since before the Civil War in regards to blacks and their civil rights.
Clinton is, indeed, the new Lyndon Johnson. She’s climbed over the bodies of her constituents to grab the brass ring of the Democrat candidacy for President. She’s signed on some of the worst race baiters alive today, like John Lewis and Andrew Young, to climb over Barack Obama. All for political expediency.
How many times have we heard that we’ve already had the first Black president in Bill Clinton simply because some poet, Toni Morrison, and some comedian, Chris Rock, bestowed that label on him in jest? Her campaign is simply implying that Obama can’t be the first black president but Hillary can be the first woman president.
Maybe the Obama campaign should announce that Bill Clinton was the first lesbian president to steal that title from Hillary.
(h/t to Steve T)
Category: Historical, Politics, Society
