Robert Shrum: LBJ's Pens and Obama's Peril

Robert Shrum
LBJ's pens and Obama's peril

The president has to tell us who he’s fighting for, who he’s taking on, and why the Republicans are not just the party of no, but — in the words of FDR — the party of “greed and privilege.” He can’t allow himself to be trapped in futile pleas for bipartisanship reminiscent of LBJ’s protean desire to be loved by everyone. It’s decision time — he has to draw sharp and vivid distinctions that can seize and hold the nation’s attention. To pose a compelling choice, he has to show that his domestic fights, from jobs to health care to taxes, all exist within the same framework.

Thus, Obama shouldn’t duck or compromise on Republican demands to re-up the Bush tax cuts for the very wealthy scheduled to expire at the end of December. Ignoring the rump of lily-livered Democrats who want to cut and run, the president should embrace this contest and hammer away at the choice: He’s for middle-class tax cuts — and the GOP is for a windfall that would comfort the comfortable, do less than almost any alternative stimulus to spur the economy, and add $1 trillion to the deficit in the coming decade. This goes to the heart of the difference between the parties, extending a coherent appeal to fairness over privilege. It’s also the best hope to limit midterm losses — and the best way to lay the predicate for a 2012 re-election that does more than reflect economic revival, but ratifies an ideological victory that can endure for a generation. That’s what made FDR and Reagan great.

The president needs to go into the December reassessment with a hard resolve: If we can’t win in Afghanistan, at reasonable cost in a reasonable time frame, the consequences of not winning aren’t relevant to whether we stay, but how we leave. We may have to settle for a deal, explicit or implicit, with warlords and the Taliban. The result may be a repellent regime; and the safeguard against the reopening of sanctuaries for terrorism will have to be the threat of massive retaliation from the air. Alternatively, if the president decides to stay the present course, he has to be honest about the definition of success and set tough benchmarks for measuring it. And this shouldn’t have to be WikiLeaked; it should all be stated plainly and publicly—and then debated openly in a round of televised Senate hearings.

The hardest thing in politics, or government, is to renounce your own strategy. But in Afghanistan, the president can’t let failure become an excuse for its own perpetuation. That’s what LBJ did in Vietnam. Instead Obama could remember JFK’s likely course; except this time, if it’s the right decision, Obama should withdraw well before the next presidential election.

Obama aspires to be a great president — and nothing here is meant to gainsay his historic accomplishments. But history is hard, always demanding more. Facing the task of re-engaging with his fellow citizens and the fateful question of disengaging from Afghanistan, this president ought to think about the wall and the pens so breathtakingly displayed in his predecessor’s library. In the end, the LBJ Library memorializes glory disfigured by disaster. It is a teaching place.

So Barack Obama must do what Johnson could not: He must reach and win the hearts and minds of the American people; and he must decide soon, with political courage, what he will do about the nation’s longest war (ironically, what Vietnam also was in its time). The truest lesson is that a president can focus on history and yet lose his place in it. Legacy matters. But like the people they serve, presidents have to live in the present, not just the future.

http://theweek.com/bullpen/column/205568/lbjs-pens-and-obamas-peril