“I WILL NOT SEEK, NOR WILL I ACCEPT, THE NOMINATION OF MY PARTY…”

9/16/11

Like many people, ideas, great or otherwise, tend to come to me while I am showering. One wonders why the shower is such fertile ground for mental mastication, but that is another issue. At any rate, the other morning, a question occurred to me while taking an uncharacteristically hot (in order to battle the bug with which I have been struggling this week) shower: Could President Obama pull a Johnson and drop out of the race for the presidency in 2012?

No, I don’t think this will happen; the idea of a modern politician having the scruples, and concern for his country, of even as despicable a character as LBJ is ludicrous. The only thing that matters to our hyper-narcissistic, even relative to the likes of Johnson, modern political class is the self, and Mr. Obama is no exception to this rule. But the idea is interesting to consider. The economy may be the President’s Vietnam, an intractable problem resistant to any solution the president is willing to try, an unrelenting source of misery best left to somebody else. Some say that Johnson left the 1968 race because he knew he could not win, but that was certainly not the case; his announcement came in the wake of his having won the New Hampshire primary, albeit to the unelectable Gene McCarthy, but not having won by a sufficiently substantial margin to convince him that winning the nomination would be a slam dunk and thus would not divide his party. There is little question, though, that, had he stuck it out, LBJ would have been the nominee of his Party and, given the hair’s breadth margin by which Richard Nixon beat the eventual Democratic nominee, LBJ’s vice-president Hubert Humphrey, it seems entirely plausible, if perhaps not likely, that LBJ would have been reelected. LBJ just decided, apparently, that it just wasn’t worth dividing the country to win reelection or, more likely, he was sick and tired of it and if all these other people wanted his job so badly they could have it.

One obvious part of the Lyndon Johnson/Barack Obama parallelism is primary opposition…but maybe not. Barack Obama will not get serious, if any, opposition in the primaries if for no other reasons that, first, it is getting late and, second, any serious opponent risks alienating, to put it mildly, black voters and thus winding up with at best a pyrrhic victory for the nomination and no (zero) chance of winning the general election. But those of us who were around in 1968 remember that Gene McCarthy was very much a fringe candidate in 1968, a gadfly backed by a handful of rich guys who backed him for, mirabile dictu, almost purely ideological reasons. Senator McCarthy had no chance of becoming president, as is clearly evidenced by the sudden influx of legitimate contenders (Hubert Humphrey, Bobby Kennedy, and, later, even George McGovern) after LBJ dropped out. So even a similarly, though amplified, quixotic candidacy by a Dennis Kucinich type character from the fringes that manages to come close enough to scare the President could result in a 1968 redux.

Could, but probably won’t. But those of us who like the horse race aspects of politics like to play with perhaps implausible scenarios.