Barack Obama & the Establishment: Is He More Ronald Reagan Than FDR?

Obama and the Legacy of Franklin Roosevelt & Lyndon Johnson

Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, in their 1971 book Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare, claimed that President Lyndon Baines Johnson's Great Society was a way to channel the "boodle" of federal money directly to inner-city blacks. LBJ sought to circumvent the Democratic Party bosses who dominated the big cities, who were reluctant to let African Americans, many of them only recently arrived in their metropolises, to participate in political patronage they control. The party bosses bristled at the lack of control over so much patronage, as the normal hierarchy of loyalties was diverted from the grassroots straight to the top of the political pyramid.

Eyes on the Prize

The Presidency in America is a prize that has to be one, and it is a brutal process. One of the tap roots of Robert F. Kennedy's resentment of LBJ was that, due to the caprice of an assassin's bullet in Johnson's native state of Texas, LBJ by default "won" the prize of the Presidency that Bobby and Jack Kennedy and the Kennedy family and their allies worked so hard to gain. The 1960 Presidential campaign was particularly hard fought, and the margin of victory had been small.

In the 1960 Presidential election, the African American inner-city vote had been crucial for the first time. Blacks had been Republicans since gaining the vote, the Grand Old Party being the Party of Lincoln, the Great Emancipator. When African Americans began to migrate to the cities of the industrialized north cities, joining their brethren already located there, they switched allegiance to the local Democratic machines that controlled big city politics. However, in national elections they remained loyal to the G.O.P. until the Great Depression. In the 1932 Presidential election, a majority of African American voters went for the Democratic candidate for the first time in history.