Coalition for Victory in ’68: Will LBJ Get Republican Votes?

As the weeks slip by it becomes plainer and plainer that the really decisive happening of November 8, 1966 was the one reported in the New York Times under the heading “GOP and Liberals in Texas Happy.” Conservative supporters of Sen. John Tower had counted on a liberal “assist” for victory over Waggoner Carr, the Connally-Johnson man. M. Stanton Evans had predicted that Tower’s “most vital asset” would be the “disgruntled Texas liberals who don’t like Connally or Carr and may stay home.” When the votes were counted, conservatives were jubilant, as expected, for everything had “turned out just fine … Carr, the Democratic Image, LBJ all went down to ignominious defeat.’ The newsworthy novelty proved to be that the Texas liberals were equally jubilant, and that “there was no contradiction in this” because, as the Times reported, “it had been planned that way.” AFL-CIO leaders and other liberals in Texas had planned to defeat the Johnson candidate by as wide a margin as possible “through the passive coalition of Republican conservatives and Democratic liberals”; and so, instead of staying home on election day, disgruntled, they had come out as planned to vote and rejoice with the Republican conservatives. Perhaps the Times story claims too much for Texas liberals. Perhaps the AFL-CIO boast is just face-saving to minimize the conservative significance of the GOP gains around the country. Still, the obvious truth is that liberal Democrats in many states are so dissatisfied with the dominant wing of their national organization that they would rather lose than be stuck with it, not only in state elections, as in Texas, Oregon and New York, but even, and perhaps particularly, in the coming Presidential election. The New York Post’s Murray Kempton makes no bones about it. “Mr. Johnson” he says, “could be forgiven for being an appalling man when he offered the illusion of getting things done; now he is simply an appalling man. And we are presented with a number of Republicans considerably more presentable and possibly a little more sensible. There is a real chance that one of them can beat Mr. Johnson in 1968.” Chances are slight that the President can be denied his own party’s nomination in 68. The one man who could conceivably do it, Robert Kennedy, is too shrewd to pursue what could be at best only a Pyrrhic victory. Openly divided at the top, the party would have little chance of winning, and not only in ’68. Kennedy will therefore support his party’s chief next time at least as enthusiastically as he supported Frank O’Connor for governor of New York in the last election. If Johnson is too much ~ for the Democratic liberals to take until 1972, they will simply have to look beyond their party for a suitable alternative.

The Republican liberals broke up their party in ’64 to guarantee a Johnson victory. Now it is the task of the Democratic liberals to work the same maneuver with the tables turned. They have already mounted a hate campaign against Johnson that dwarfs the proportions of the most vicious liberal attacks on Goldwater. In liberal circles everywhere, Johnson is now openly accused of being a killer in Dallas as well as in Vietnam. He is an appalling man because he is actually doing what Goldwater was charged with wanting to do, and because he treats the remnants of the liberal intelligentsia in Washington with utter contempt. It is hard to conceive of a Republican Presidential candidate whom the bipartisan liberal intelligentsia would not prefer to Johnson. In New York we have just seen what sort of shambles can be made of a once powerful Democratic organization when the liberal intelligentsia deserts it. Is Johnson’s national coalition equally vulnerable? Here is what James Reston, with his usual strategic timing, said about it right after the last election: The race issue, the rise of taxes and the cost of war are breaking up the old Roosevelt coalition of the South, . the urban poor and the intellectuals. What one group wants the other rejects. The Negroes want open housing, for example, but many white workers oppose it. The normally Democratic workingman may support the war, but many of the normally Democratic intellectuals are against it. This can be demonstrated in one state election after another. The New Deal coalition had been from the beginning an unnatural one, held together only by the cunning of the liberal intelligentsia that forged it for Roosevelt. In Al Smith’s day the Democratic coalition had been “middleclass” in the strict, traditional sense, with well-to-do Republicans above it and a mass of Negro freedmen below it. Republicans could descend into it by becoming or considering themselves poor, and Negroes could rise into it by migrating from the defeated South to the industrial North to join the ranks of immigrant workers. Under Roosevelt the liberal elite had its opportunity to work the coalition down to the bottom, transforming it into a distinctly lower-class foundation for democratic or proletarian monarchy. That unnatural coalition worked to re-elect FDR three times; and it has won for Truman, Kennedy and Johnson. But it remains what it was in the beginning:

HP

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Henry Paolucci

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Presidential Election

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Texas

As the weeks slip by it becomes plainer and plainer that the really decisive happening of November 8, 1966 was the one reported in the New York Times under the heading “GOP and Liberals in Texas Happy.” Conservative supporters of Sen. John Tower had counted on a liberal “assist” for victory over Waggoner Carr, the Connally-Johnson man. M. Stanton Evans had predicted that Tower’s “most vital asset” would be the “disgruntled Texas liberals who don’t like Connally or Carr and may stay home.” When the votes were counted, conservatives were jubilant, as expected, for everything had “turned out just fine … Carr, the Democratic Image, LBJ all went down to ignominious defeat.’ The newsworthy novelty proved to be that the Texas liberals were equally jubilant, and that “there was no contradiction in this” because, as the Times reported, “it had been planned that way.” AFL-CIO leaders and other liberals in Texas had planned to defeat the Johnson candidate by as wide a margin as possible “through the passive coalition of Republican conservatives and Democratic liberals”; and so, instead of staying home on election day, disgruntled, they had come out as planned to vote and rejoice with the Republican conservatives. Perhaps the Times story claims too much for Texas liberals. Perhaps the AFL-CIO boast is just face-saving to minimize the conservative significance of the GOP gains around the country. Still, the obvious truth is that liberal Democrats in many states are so dissatisfied with the dominant wing of their national organization that they would rather lose than be stuck with it, not only in state elections, as in Texas, Oregon and New York, but even, and perhaps particularly, in the coming Presidential election. The New York Post’s Murray Kempton makes no bones about it. “Mr. Johnson” he says, “could be forgiven for being an appalling man when he offered the illusion of getting things done; now he is simply an appalling man. And we are presented with a number of Republicans considerably more presentable and possibly a little more sensible. There is a real chance that one of them can beat Mr. Johnson in 1968.” Chances are slight that the President can be denied his own party’s nomination in 68. The one man who could conceivably do it, Robert Kennedy, is too shrewd to pursue what could be at best only a Pyrrhic victory. Openly divided at the top, the party would have little chance of winning, and not only in ’68. Kennedy will therefore support his party’s chief next time at least as enthusiastically as he supported Frank O’Connor for governor of New York in the last election. If Johnson is too much ~ for the Democratic liberals to take until 1972, they will simply have to look beyond their party for a suitable alternative.

The Republican liberals broke up their party in ’64 to guarantee a Johnson victory. Now it is the task of the Democratic liberals to work the same maneuver with the tables turned. They have already mounted a hate campaign against Johnson that dwarfs the proportions of the most vicious liberal attacks on Goldwater. In liberal circles everywhere, Johnson is now openly accused of being a killer in Dallas as well as in Vietnam. He is an appalling man because he is actually doing what Goldwater was charged with wanting to do, and because he treats the remnants of the liberal intelligentsia in Washington with utter contempt. It is hard to conceive of a Republican Presidential candidate whom the bipartisan liberal intelligentsia would not prefer to Johnson. In New York we have just seen what sort of shambles can be made of a once powerful Democratic organization when the liberal intelligentsia deserts it. Is Johnson’s national coalition equally vulnerable? Here is what James Reston, with his usual strategic timing, said about it right after the last election: The race issue, the rise of taxes and the cost of war are breaking up the old Roosevelt coalition of the South, . the urban poor and the intellectuals. What one group wants the other rejects. The Negroes want open housing, for example, but many white workers oppose it. The normally Democratic workingman may support the war, but many of the normally Democratic intellectuals are against it. This can be demonstrated in one state election after another. The New Deal coalition had been from the beginning an unnatural one, held together only by the cunning of the liberal intelligentsia that forged it for Roosevelt. In Al Smith’s day the Democratic coalition had been “middleclass” in the strict, traditional sense, with well-to-do Republicans above it and a mass of Negro freedmen below it. Republicans could descend into it by becoming or considering themselves poor, and Negroes could rise into it by migrating from the defeated South to the industrial North to join the ranks of immigrant workers. Under Roosevelt the liberal elite had its opportunity to work the coalition down to the bottom, transforming it into a distinctly lower-class foundation for democratic or proletarian monarchy. That unnatural coalition worked to re-elect FDR three times; and it has won for Truman, Kennedy and Johnson. But it remains what it was in the beginning: