We Love Ass-Whuppers!

Over at TPM, David Kurtz highlights a reader’s email: ”Imagine what would have happened to Joe Lieberman long ago if Lyndon Johnson were President.”

WWLBJD! I feel like I hear things like this all the time in lefty circles. In this particularly case, it’s a nice scenario to ponder, indeed. Would LBJ have threatened to build a federal highway atop Lieberman’s house? Relocated his personal office to Alaska? Done all while wiping his ass right in front of Holy Joe in the Oval Office washroom?

Once upon a time, good liberals were supposed to disdain Johnson as a lying, manipulating, war-prosecuting bully. Robert Caro has dedicated, what, 312,000 pages or so to uncovering the 36th president’s conniving ways. And most of the efforts at LBJ rehabilitation in recent years have focused on his policy stances: He signed a Civil Rights bill even though he knew it would doom his fellow Southern Democrats. His Great Society, for all its mistakes, represented the last serious federal effort to help the poor. And so on.

But I think the under-appreciated reason why liberals of the post-Vietnam generation have warmed to LBJ has less to do with the noble policy ends and more to do with the ignoble means: We love that Johnson was such an ass-kicker! After years of having their hats handed to them by nasty GOP operatives, while finding their own side led by pols who seemed to have skipped their Machiavelli 101, the notion of a president willing to kick the other side in the balls is very appealing.

And, back during the campaign, it was part of Obama’s appeal, too. Yeah, the rhetoric was all hope and earnestness. But supporters in my circle, at least, all waxed rhapsodic about one of the fouding myths of his political career: The way he got an opponent kicked off the ballot in his first State Senate race. This was, people whispered, an ass-whupper.

Is he? I think the jury’s still out. His campaign tacticians won themselves enough respect that, since his election, conciliatory gestures–like his forgiving stance towards Lieberman’s endorsement of McCain–tend to be viewed as evidence of strategic genius, rather than as signs that he may be wishy-washy. And when his rhetoric does get partisan, as Matt Yglesias points out today, it’s invariably followed by stories suggesting he’s somehow betraying the promise of his campaign.

I suspect most Obamaphiles wouldn’t feel that way. Yeah, they voted for a guy with JFK’s air of cool. But I think a lot of them dug the idea that he also had LBJ’s inner thug on board, too.