Who here remembers LBJ's Great Society ?

Help me out here. Where am I going wrong.

I think that when many of the Great Society programs failed to solve the problems that they were created for and the dollars spent were added up, it gave the Repugs the means to say "liberal" is a dirty word.

Those failures also began the shift to the center for many Dems and helped Reagan get elected. It made it hard for McGovern and Dukakas to run as liberals and win. It is why there is a DLC.

I think that enough of that remains that any move too far to the left in this election will make it easier for Bush to be back in the White House in 2004.

I've decided that Clark is the only Dem running that can beat that rap and pass the homeland security test.

A Clark for President goes on my bumper as soon as I get one.

from neglect?? I do not remember him running against the programs in principle, although he was good at using the code phrases, such as 'law and order', etc.

Ronnie implicitly ran against such programs as 'food stamps' (which are really coupons). Untrue or irrelavent anecdotes were used in great and devastating abundance. But the Great Society isn't, IMO, why McGovern lost. NO ONE could have beaten Nixon in 1972.

began under Nixon... Bob Dole and George McGocern spearheaded the legislation.... Nixon also passed the nation's first affirmative action program and the Clean Air Act...


Medicaid


Medicare


The Voting Rights Act

The Civil Rights Act

The Fair Housing Act

When folks say the Great Society was a failure which program or piece of legislation would they like to repeal...

These programs enjoy broad bipartisan support....

But don't forget.....the Great Society was torpedoed by the Vietnam War.

LBJ tried to have both guns and butter; it worked for a while but in the end there really wasn't the money for the Great Society.

What you say is the way the Republicans interpreted it and sold it.

After the 60s, the democratic party was labeled the party of rebellion and drugs and anti-americanism.

A bit later, at the end of the 70s and in the Reagan-Bush years, the democratic party was labeled the party of 'special interests': women, students, minorities, labor unions, people needing govt help.

Oddly enough, corporations were never defined as 'special interests.'

I believe the term "special interests" even before FDR was used exclusively to mean corporate and financial interests. That changed in the 1970s, when the corporations and the government tried to weaken the women's movement, the civil rights movement, and unions, who were fighting very hard at the time. Reagan got into office on just that sort of propaganda.

I had forgotten that.

Part of the whole 'republicans have taken over the political language and defined everything in their favor.'

or withered away.
It has been under constant republican bombardment since it's inception and has been badly wounded.
And when Johnson signed the Civil Rights act, he said that he just handed the South to the Republicans for a generation.
And the Republicans have used the race card every election since.
( I prefer to call it the stupid vote)

Every ideal of the Great Society is not a failure in any measure.
Johnson drug the Democratic party kicking and screaming into the Racial equality mainstream almost singlehandedly and transformed the nation in the manner of John Kennedy's dream.

It isn't failed or dead, it just needs a backbone transplant.

the failure is another bit of repub propaganda/urban legend. Look up the programs of the Great Society, you'll find many of them alive and kicking, and eating up considerably less than $85 bill. These things worked; they still work (like Head Start), and yet we get this constant drumbeat of how it was a failure. LIES, my friend!

it didn`t fail i guess the best thing is that`s lost.....

How many people would have died if it hadn't been for those programs, however gutted they have been?

Remember the hundreds of thousands who died because of the Reagan cuts, before the Dems *Finally* put an end to those cuts?

I guess, if you really want to find out how much of a failure they are, cut 'em all off WHACK, and then keep accurate counts of the deaths.

Kanary

It is a myth that these programs did not work. Were they perfect? No. Did they help? Definitely.

Medicare, the War on Poverty, Head Start, Affirmative Action, the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, the Clear Air, Water Quality and Clean Water Restoration Acts and Amendments, the 1965 Solid Waste Disposal Act, the 1965 Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Control Act, and the 1968 Aircraft Noise Abatement Act. They also provided the rationale for later laws creating the Environmental Protection Agency and the Superfund that (is supposed to exact financial payment from past polluters.

Thirty-five national parks were establishe during the Great Society years. The 1968 Wild and Scenic Rivers Act today protects 155 river segments in 37 states. The 1968 National Trail System Act has established more than 800 recreational, scenic, and historic trails covering 40,000 miles.

It doesn't sound like a failure to me, but I can see that even you have come to question whether this is true.

Nixon signed off on the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Air Act. Say what you will about Nixon, I despised the man, but he seems like a far-left liberal by today's sandards, save his continued promotion of the war.

Try this piece by Joe Califano, the former Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare (a cabinet position that no longer exists, now effectively the Welfare "Reform" Department run by Tommy Thompson):

<snip>
If there is a prize for the political scam of the 20th century, it should go to the conservatives for propagating as conventional wisdom that the Great Society programs of the 1960s were a misguided and failed social experiment that wasted taxpayers' money.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, from 1963 when Lyndon Johnson took office until 1970 as the impact of his Great Society programs were felt, the portion of Americans living below the poverty line dropped from 22.2 percent to 12.6 percent, the most dramatic decline over such a brief period in this century. Since then, the poverty rate has hovered at about the 13 percent level and sits at 13.3 percent today, still a disgraceful level in the context of the greatest economic boom in our history. But if the Great Society had not achieved that dramatic reduction in poverty, and the nation had not maintained it, 24 million more Americans would today be living below the poverty level.

This reduction in poverty did not just happen. It was the result of a focused, tenacious effort to revolutionize the role of the federal government with a series of interventions that enriched the lives of millions of Americans. In those tumultuous Great Society years, the President submitted, and Congress enacted, more than 100 major proposals in each of the 89th and 90th Congresses. In that era of do-it-now optimism, government was neither a bad man to be tarred and feathered nor a bag man to collect campaign contributions, but an instrument to help the most vulnerable in our society.

What has the verdict been? Did the programs we put into place in the 1960s vindicate our belief in the responsibility and capacity of the national government to achieve such ambitious goals, or do they stand as proof of the government's inability to effect dramatic change that helps our people?

more: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/1999/9910.califano.html#byline

I firmly believe that without welfare, housing, food stamps, energy assistance, and medical that our economy would be at much greater danger at going into depression. These programs keep a basic supply of money flowing into the economy from the bottom, that's why food stamps comes out of the Ag budget. These programs have worked in alot of ways.

The trick is to keep them from keeping wages depressed, which they do when the same Republicans that 'hate' these programs use them as an excuse to keep the minimum wage down. The other side is to not make them so generous that they artificially increase the prices to the extent that the rest of us can't afford to pay for these basic needs ourselves. It's worked in every area except health care, but I blame that on regular insurance.

As far as generations of welfare dependent people, they might have been in poverty in any event. There might be something else going on there that we need to solve. Whether it's getting them off welfare or out of poverty, the same solution of believing there's hope for economic success would probably need to be applied.

... employ, house, feed, and educate the people. It's no wonder the pukes can't stand them. They need poor people around to feel superior to.

From memory: The Great Society programs were succeeding in reducing poverty and helping the disadvantaged get a chance to play in the game of capitalism. What's odd is that the same cretins who are so quick to denigrate the programs, Pruneface Reagan springs to mind, are the ones who de-funded the most successful programs.

Poppy Bush, it should be remembered, blamed the 1992 LA riots after the Rodney King police beating verdict on the "failed Great Society programs." The racist turd skinflint is incapble of any kindness toward another human being. Like all great caretakers of great wealth, the wimp even began his badministration by stating government couldn't afford to do much of anything, as we "have more will than wallet" in his inaugural speech.

Bush Sr will be remembered for being a cheap bastard, especially by We the People. For Them the Rich, he bailed out the Savings & Loans to the tune of a trillion and a half. Gee. The same shits who looted the money in the first place get the benefit of the government insurance and interest payments on the bond notes.

Wonder why they hate Democrats? Democrats like FDR used government to end the Depression, fight the Fascists and win the Cold War. In anothe example, JFK's Apollo program proved we could make the impossible a reality — get a man to the moon and return him safely to the earth within the decade. Wow! Imagine what we could do if we set our minds to solving the problems on earth?