She Don't Like Ike

James Taranto - Opinionjournal.com

How desperate is Hillary Clinton in the face of the Obama juggernaut? So desperate that she is smearing a genuine war hero. And we seem to be the first to notice it.

The Politico's Ben Smith set off a bit of a kerfuffle yesterday when he noted that Mrs. Clinton, in an interview with Fox News's Major Garrett, seemed to be likening front-runner Barack Obama to Martin Luther King, and not in a good way:

[Mrs.] Clinton rejoined the running argument over hope and "false hope" in an interview in Dover this afternoon, reminding Fox's Major Garrett that while Martin Luther King Jr. spoke on behalf of civil rights, President Lyndon Johnson was the one who got the legislation passed. . . .

"Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act," Clinton said. "It took a president to get it done."

Josh Marshall weighed in with a halfhearted defense of Mrs. Clinton. He quotes her at length:

"I would, and I would point to the fact that that Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do, the President before had not even tried, but it took a president to get it done. That dream became a reality, the power of that dream became real in peoples lives because we had a president who said we are going to do it, and actually got it accomplished."

"It's an ambiguous statement," Marshall allows. "But her reference is to different presidents--Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, one of whom inspired but did relatively little legislatively and Johnson who did a lot legislatively, though he was rather less than inspiring. Quite apart from the merits of Obama and Clinton, it's not a bad point about Kennedy and LBJ."

Smith then defended his interpretation. What both of them missed was that passing mention about the Civil Rights Act being something "the president before had not even tried." In context, it is clear that this is a reference to the president before Kennedy--that is, Dwight Eisenhower--not to Kennedy himself, who did in fact propose civil rights legislation in 1963 but died before Congress could pass it.

This, however, is a smear against Ike, who was a much better civil-rights president than he typically gets credit for. As Bruce Bartlett explains in "Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party's Buried Past" (available from the OpinionJournal bookstore):

In his January 10, 1957, State of the Union Address, Eisenhower renewed his request for civil rights legislation, which had passed the House but died in the Senate in the previous Congress due to Southern Democratic delaying tactics. . . .

Everyone knew that the critical fight on the civil rights bill would be in the Senate. . . . In that body, the key figure was Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, who represented the [former] Confederate state of Texas and had been installed in his position by Southern Democrats precisely in order to block civil rights legislation. Until the 1950s, Johnson's record of opposition to all civil rights legislation was spotless. But he was ambitious and wanted to be president. . . .

After dragging his feet on the civil rights bill throughout much of 1957, Johnson finally came to the conclusion that the tide had turned in favor of civil rights and he needed to be on the right side of the issue if he hoped to become president. . . .

At the same time, the Senate's master tactician and principal opponent of the civil rights bill, Democrat Richard B. Russell of Georgia, saw the same handwriting on the wall but came to a different conclusion. He realized that the support was no longer there for an old-fashioned Democrat filibuster. . . . So Russell adopted a different strategy this time of trying to amend the civil rights bill so as to minimize its impact. Behind the scenes, Johnson went along with Russell's strategy of not killing the civil rights bill, but trying to neuter it as much as possible. . . .

Eisenhower was disappointed at not being able to produce a better piece of legislation. "I wanted a much stronger civil rights bill in '57 than I could get," he later lamented. "But the Democrats . . . wouldn't let me have it."

Liberals criticized Eisenhower for getting such a modest bill at the end of the day. But Johnson argued that it was historically important because it was the first civil rights bill to pass Congress since 1875. "Once you break virginity," he said, "it'll be easier next time."

To put it mildly, LBJ was not a consistent advocate of racial equality. Bartlett (both in his book and in this article) quotes LBJ's explanation of why he backed the Civil Rights Act of 1957:

"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."

You can see where Mrs. Clinton, with her finger-to-the-wind approach to some of today's most pressing issues, might feel a certain kinship with LBJ. On the other hand, it's not at all clear that LBJ's presidency was a necessary condition for the passage of the Civil Rights Act. If Richard Nixon, Eisenhower's vice president, had won the 1960 election and LBJ had remained in the Senate as majority leader, it's easy to imagine the latter--with an eye toward the presidency in 1964 or '68--shepherding the Civil Rights Act through the Senate and the former signing it.

LBJ was, after all, a very effective legislator. Can the same be said of New York's junior senator? Oddly, Mrs. Clinton has chosen to compare herself to a deeply flawed president. Odder still, the comparison ends up underscoring her failure to measure up.