On March 31, 1968, United States President Lyndon Baines Johnson told a national television audience that he would not seek and would not accept the nomination of the Democratic Party for another term in the White House. “When the address was over,” author Hampton Sides notes, “a euphoric Johnson leaped from his chair and bounded from Oval Office to be with family. ‘His air was that of a prisoner let free,’ the First Lady wrote: ‘We were all fifty pounds lighter and ever so much more lookin’ forward to the future’…The president described his mood this way: ‘I never felt so right about any decision in life.’”
Harassed and depressed by antiwar demonstrators, urban riots, rampaging youth, unruly professors and reporters, and a deadly colonial quagmire in Southeast Asia, Johnson felt that (as he later told historian Doris Goodwin) he “was being chased on all sides by a giant stampede coming at me from all directions.” And by Bobby Kennedy. He wanted out. He left and it felt good.Read that paragraph, and you can see the failure of the left and the antiwar movement during the Obama years. You could say that Obama is mired in a deadly colonial quagmire in SouthWEST Asia. Other than that, none of these things that drove LBJ from office exist under Obama.
Obama has not been harrassed and depressed by antiwar demonstrations, despite escalating Bush's wars and starting his own.
Obama has not been harrassed and depreessed by urban riots or even protests, despite his offering of what was basically Herbert Hoover's economic recovery plan of money to the banks and tax cuts to the wealthy and making the size of the deficit more important than the homes and lives of Americans.
Unruly professors and reporters have basically been banned from American society. Professors are today removed from American universities if they believe and teach anything outside the narrow band of approved opinions. Reporters that criticized Bush were fired, and outside a fringe media there's no such thing as an unruly reporter.
There are no Bobby Kennedy's willing to challenge Obama in a primary.
Thus, we know why Obama will run for, and at this time apparently win, a second term. The lesson is that antiwar demonstrations, protests and urban unrest worked in the late 60's to remove a President who's policies were opposed by most Americans. The failure to have demonstrations, protests and unrests leaves Obama and the banker-Democrats free to be the favorite front-runner for four more years of war and a wall street economy.
The question for future historians will be why have Americans been so freakin quiet during these years. They've lost their jobs and their homes. They pay exorbitant taxes to fund an over-sized military and so many wars overseas that they are becoming countless. Yet, Americans refuse to do what history tells them has worked in the past to at least get a chance to for real change from this awful state.
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