Campaigner
“I felt that I was being chased on all sides by a giant stampede. I was being forced over the edge by rioting blacks, demonstrating students, marching welfare mothers, squawking professors, and hysterical reporters ….”
-- President Lyndon B. Johnson; describing a recurrent nightmare to Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Politicians too often are cut off from serious communications with those they were elected to represent. This, of course, is because most are taking their orders from corporate interests who pay for their campaigns. And no politician cannot serve two masters.
No politicians are more removed than U.S. Presidents, who often exist in a glass bubble almost as protected from everyday reality as the dark cave that VP Dick Cheney inhabited …..that cave being his skull.
Thus, many of us remember being mildly surprised when “Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream,” by Doris Kearns Goodwin, was published in 1977. LBJ was not known, during his presidency, for being sympathetic with those who disagreed with him. Yet, on some level -- perhaps a combination of conscious, unconscious, and subconscious -- Johnson heard the citizens who loudly and boldly challenged him.
Older forum members will recall the May 18, 1970 edition of TIME, which confirmed that President Richard Nixon with anti-war students late one night, at the Lincoln Memorial. In numerous books since, it has been documented that Tricky Dick was intoxicated at the time. The Secret Service agents could not keep him from trying to communicate -- and yes, justify -- his adventure in Cambodia, which resulted in so much campus unrest. This made it easier for some of us to sing “Campaigner” along with Neal Young.
Today a brave woman spoke up at President Obama’s event. One might agree with her; or with the administration’s drone policy; or even see some good and bad in either or both. Just as one can like the President or not; think he’s doing a good job or not; or maybe think there are various examples ranging from “good” to “bad” in his job performance.
But we should appreciate the woman’s dedication to truth as she sees it; President Obama’s response; and we should not lose faith that a dedicated group of citizens exercising their Amendment 1 rights can gain the attention of the US President.
= new reply since forum marked as read
