The Election That LBJ Won: "My fellow Americans, we have overcome."

[DeepModem Mom]

WP: The Election That LBJ Won
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, November 4, 2008; Page A17

If the polls are right, if it don't rain and the creek don't rise, the winner of the presidential election is sure to be . . . Lyndon Baines Johnson. When he signed the epochal Civil Rights Act of 1964, Johnson knew he was also signing away the South and, with it, much of the white vote elsewhere as well. "We have lost the South for a generation," he supposedly said back then. For that generation, time's up.

Barack Obama is often called a transformational figure, and this election, it then follows, is a transformational one. I beg to quibble. Barack Obama is a confirmational figure, and this election confirms what has been gradually occurring in American society ever since that July day when Johnson virtually outlawed most forms of racial segregation in America. We've been transforming ever since....

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I am not naive. Pockets of racism exist, and depending on the issue -- crime, for instance -- they can swell. But the country has changed. It has done so because of personalities, policies and actions that at the time might have been questionable. The civil rights acts of the Johnson era compelled whites to eat with blacks in the same restaurants and to share the same motels and hotels. Affirmative action accustomed whites to seeing blacks in positions from which they had, by custom or by law, been excluded. Blacks and whites could, in fact, work together. The racists were wrong....

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Just as John F. Kennedy was only incidentally a Catholic, so is Obama only incidentally a black man. It is not just that he is post-racial; so is the nation he is generationally primed to lead. This, of course, was the dream of the man who is buried on his beloved ranch -- the unheralded winner of this election. As he would put it: My fellow Americans, we have overcome.

LBJ, RIP.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/03/AR2008110302609.html?hpid%3Dopinionsbox1&sub=AR