Barbecue Politics

After all the press hosannas over President Johnson's eloquent voting-rights speech to Congress, Commonweal's Washington Correspondent William Shannon weighed in with a sharp and sober warning: "President Johnson is running what may be termed the rhetoric risk. He likes to promise everybody something and to dream aloud, admittedly more often in the language of the Snopes family than of Aristotle, about the wonderful future that is acoming. As a Texan and an heir to that state's neoPopulist traditions, he is a natural master of the America-is-agreat-big-wonderful-barbecue school of politics."

Will L.B.J. be able to produce what he has promised? Shannon has his doubts. Johnson's "programs are designed to evade rather than confront the hard issues. He believes in consensus, not conflict. The barbecue school of politics is not based on any belief in redistributing wealth or disturbing anyone's existing privileges; rather, it presupposes there is enough meat, and gravy too, for everyone at the tables." Johnson's small-scale proposals on health, education and poverty are tied to a "neverending economic expansion," writes Shannon. If the economy falters or fails to expand very fast, those programs may not pay off and people will be soured on their President. "If he sells every legislative proposal hard and oversells many of them, he may fairly soon provoke public disillusionment and disbelief." Shannon, who--in the company of other liberal commentators--used to fault John Kennedy for not being enough of a salesman, has apparently decided that supersales-manship has its perils too.

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