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pacman91 on 11 October 2010
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Mr Khan said:
pacman91 said:
Mr Khan said:

Lyndon Johnson forever. The last effective expansion of social welfare programs (TBD. We'll see if Obama gets a chance to more aggressively expand the new health care plans), and he crushed racism in a way that even Obama is too scared to tackle. It's too bad that Vietnam has effectively alienated him from the bleeding-heart set, because otherwise he could be more of an idol to liberals than Reagan is to conservatives
  • Government run health care is a joke
  • LBJ was an awful wartime president
  • how did LBJ crush racism?

The Civil Rights act, the Constitutional Amendment to support the Civil Rights Act, i mean, he was a Southern Democrat who declared War on the Klan, and provided the top-down impetus to help MLK and his movement to get as far as they did. And the war on poverty was the most noble endeavor undertaken since the New Deal, but the problem was Johnson couldn't support the two Wars simultaneously

Vietnam is a black mark against him historically, but domestically he's possibly one of the best we've ever had, ever. Kinda the opposite of Nixon, who really played foreign affairs well (opening China was a genius move), but had one of the most horrid domestic agendas out of the set

I guess from a policy stand point he did as much as a president could to combat blantant, violent racism. To that extent you are correct.  I guess laying down the framework...yeah I can see that. Really that's all he needed to do.

As far as combatting poverty with ineffiecient government programs and not being able to effectively lead the nation in a war, he's not a great president in my eyes. But I guess we'll agree to disagree on the economics/poverty issue.

Interesting comparison between Nixon and LBJ. The Irony was in the 68 election Nixon was painted to be more likely to purge the U.S. into vietnam(more than we already were).