The Comparisons to Johnson Begin

Lyndon Johnson is my favorite President.  The Great Society, the War on Poverty, a Virgo.  What's not to like?  (Oh right, VIETNAM...) So much of our anti-poverty infrastructure came about under Johnson, programs such as Medicaid and Medicare and Head Start that remain less villified (if much more costly) than FDR's welfare ever was.

My understanding of Johnson's anti-poverty efforts is that they were explicitly urban and originally aimed to strengthen urban poor communities to advocate and plan for and take care of their own needs, through the creation of the Community Action Program and Model Cities that delivered federal support directly to local non-profits and neighborhoods.  This was a pretty provocative move, in effect an attempt to cut out the middle-man of mayors and local elected leaders so that more funds could reach mostly black and Latin@ inner-city neighborhoods that had been torn up in the prior decades by federal highways, slum clearance programs, and public housing construction (which, as you know, has a complicated history).  Unsurprisingly, federal funds poured directly into neighborhoods to support organizing of the poor and non-white worried and angered local leaders.  Their lobbying eventually led to the rollback of these initiatives.  About 1,000 Community Action Agencies remain, providing job training, energy efficiency, utility assistance and other stop-gap or skills improvement programs for poor Americans.

The comparisons of Obama to Johnson have arrived, following his budget outline last week.

He's proposing a "Great Society" for "the middle-class;" which is not exactly bold, the author argues.  (Though is it just me or is there a bit of CDS going on in that piece?)  Alternatively, no one has spoken this boldly since Johnson declared war on racial discrimination and oppression. So which is it?  Is he boldly going where few have gone before, or is he a policy milquetoast like Clinton?

I think our vaunted middle-class is economically vulnerable like never before, and I think we should have woken up to this impending reality a long time ago.  I think Obama's efforts to improve education, deal with healthcare, and lay the beginnings of a new energy infrastructure are necessary, long overdue, inevitable and promising.  Bold?  I'm skeptical.  Targeting the middle-class is both politically popular and feasible in a way that truly going after poverty and inequality will never be.  As this Tribal elder fears, in this time of crisis, the programs and funds Obama has promised will go to the better off among those of us who are hurting - they will reach the tribes, states and towns that know how to write grants, or have able-bodied populations who can transfer easily into new jobs programs.  I was in a meeting a few weeks ago with NYS representatives who were trying to figure out how to design a jobs program that reached both the chronically hard to employ versus laid-off middle-managers.  This is no small feat, and one countless localities will by-pass, choosing a "skimming" strategy that gets the easiest to help back into the workforce as quickly as possible.

This makes sense from their perspective.  But it's likely we'll have entrenched inequality as bad or worse than we have now.  That's typically the reality after disasters, which is what we're living through.  Sadly, our sizable middle-class (pretty much any American if you ask them) has never proven interested in confronting poverty and inequality in their neighborhoods.  Johnson may have been a...chose your word that I can't really type on this site...but he drove through some controversial anti-poverty programs, many of which succeeded and many of which didn't.  I give him a lot of credit for that.  Obama....well, I wish I could be as enthusiastic.

(UPI Photo by Corbis-Bettman: "President Lyndon Johnson met with prominent black leaders on January 18, 1964, to discuss his war on poverty. From left to right are: Roy Wilkins, Executive Director of the NAACP; James Farmer, National Director of the Congress of Racial Equality; Martin Luther King, Jr., head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Whitney Young of the Urban League; and Johnson.")