Clinton v. Trump: Politics, War and the 2016 Presidential Race – Part I

This post is the first part of an essay which addresses the topic of power politics at the highest levels of office in the United States, especially at the presidential level. 

 

Today’s writing sets the background for describing the nature of the current run for the U.S. Presidency as I see it by harkening back to the days when Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson (All the way with LBJ!!) assumed control of the Oval Office after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

The second and final part of the essay will follow on the next post.

It will deal with the power plays and tactics which we might expect to see employed by Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in the red heat of their run for the Presidency of the U.S.

IT HAPPENED THEN, ALMOST SIX DECADES AGO:

“All the Way” is the title of an award-winning play that depicts the tumultuous years of the LBJ Presidency during the 1960’s – a time of the Kennedy assassination, of racial strife, and of the acceleration of the Vietnam War.  Enough of an agenda to test the mettle of any president.

Recently, Pris and I viewed that play in Washington, D.C. courtesy of our daughter and, a few weeks later, on a PBS special of the same name.

Lyndon Baines Johnson was a master political strategist and tactician who knew how to cajole, twist arms, and effectively threaten – anything to get his programs through the U.S. Congress.

 

Written into the play and movie are a couple of lines which clearly personify LBJ’s approach to governance within Washington’s Beltway.  I remember them vividly, because they accurately encapsulate the nature of the present struggle in the 2016 battle for the Oval Office between Clinton and Trump.

During one of LBJ’s heated internal White House discussions that includes no small measure of cussing, he booms out his unqualified opinion of what the practice of rarified politics consists of in Washington’s atmosphere of endless contention fueled by strong-arm persuasion.

Speaking to a member of his staff, LBJ [inaccurately, but to his own purposes] quotes Carl von Clausewitz, author of “On War,” a book written in the 1800’s, yet still in use by military colleges today:

“Politics is war by other means.”

But LBJ thinks that assessment is too soft:

He goes on to describe his own adaptation of that aphorism, as he intones:

“. . . Bullshit.  Politics is war . . . Period.  You know how to win a campaign by not losing it.  I only lost one election my whole life.  The son of a bitch stole it from me in the final seconds with a handful of fake votes.  I will carry the pain of that with me to my dying day.  But I’ll tell you what.  Nobody will ever do me that way again.”

That best typifies the attitude that passionately impelled LBJ to drive a civil rights bill forcefully through the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate and to enshrine it into Federal Law as the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

 

That successful campaign lost him the South which, at the time, was solidly Democrat.  Simultaneously, his unsuccessful expansion of the Vietnam War caused him to decide not to run for a second term after polls and demonstrations clearly showed that the nation had turned against him.

Thanks for checking in once more.  Enjoy your summer.