Word: lyndon
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...first time the sitting president of the United States has missed his own party's convention since Lyndon Johnson avoided the tempestuous 1968 Democratic meeting in the depths of the Vietnam...
...Obama wins, scenario No. 2 becomes a live option. Democrats have a history of overreaching when they win huge majorities. Franklin Roosevelt did so after his re-election landslide in 1936; so did Lyndon Johnson after 1964. Obama could as well. With big majorities in the House and Senate, he'd probably take another run at universal health care, which is what helped prompt the Gingrich revolution in 1994. He could hike taxes and impose tough new environmental regulations on business. He might preside over a messy withdrawal from Iraq and perhaps see Iran complete development of a nuclear weapon...
...reactions to his own traumas; McCain spent a year after his release studying Vietnam and its history at the National War College. McCain's Vietnam lessons dovetailed with the World War II lessons he had learned at home. He even believed his father should have resigned to protest President Lyndon Johnson's insufficient aggression. "John gets that appeasement doesn't work with our enemies," says Orson Swindle, a fellow POW who later served in the Reagan Administration. "They have to know that if they slap us, we're going to knock the hell out of them...
Every convention has its rogue narrative: Would Lyndon Johnson reach out to Bobby Kennedy in 1964? Would Reagan offer Ford a co-presidency in 1980? Could George Herbert Walker Bush tame Pat Buchanan's rebel band in 1992? The more freeze-dried the official proceedings, the hungrier reporters get for raw meat, real conflict, which has Democratic veterans like former party chairman Don Fowler looking a little drawn. He was a die-hard South Carolina Hillary Clinton champion - "but you win, you lose, you move on." A loyal cadre of Clinton bitter-enders, Fowler says, "introduces so much uncertainty into...
...middle of the Vietnam War, aides to President Lyndon Johnson spoke of seeing "the light at the end of the tunnel" - that is, until the Tet offensive early in 1968 showed the light to be that of an onrushing train. Are we finally seeing light at the end of the Iraq tunnel? It's messy, it's not what we were promised, and it's not over yet... but the basic outlines of the conflict's conclusion are emerging...