Stan Geiger

Obama and Landslide Lyndon

I've seen the word "landslide" attached to the recent election of Obama. And that's silliness.

Obama had every advantage.

He had the media on his team. Not just the news media, but the entertainment media as well. Oprah was 110 percent behind "the one." David Letterman campaigned for Obama on a nightly basis. Streisand threw her $28,500-per-seat shindig. And there were others.

Obama had $640 million to spend.

It is very difficult for either party to string together three terms in the White House. And George Bush---the man Obama rhetorically ran against---is particularly unpopular.

John McCain was anything but an attractive candidate. He's short, bald and old. He tried to reinvent himself as a conservative, but most in the Republican Party knew better. His campaign was poorly managed, never seeming to have an actual message. It was about throwing something against the wall and hoping it stuck.

Add all that up, and Obama should have won in a landslide. But he came up short. I believe the final tally had him taking 365 electoral votes, and besting McCain by a 53-46 percent margin in the popular vote.

Let's take a look at a real landslide.

Lyndon Johnson had the wind at his back in 1964. He was riding the coattails of a slain president. And there was a decided liberal tilt in the America of that day.

Johnson helped himself with a nasty campaign. He painted his opponent, Barry Goldwater, as a warmonger that would lead us into WWIII and get our children incinerated by nukes.

The tragic irony of the landslide that buried Goldwater is that it was Johnson that subsequently buried us in Vietnam.

A lot of people today think negative campaigning is something newly created by Republicans. That is incorrect. Negative campaigning has been around since the dawn of this nation. Take a look at what Thomas Jefferson did to John Adams. Back in the day, newspaper editors launched brutal attacks on one of our most revered presidents: Abraham Lincoln. They even attacked his looks, writing that he looked like an ape. And Lyndon Johnson "swift boated" Goldwater in '64.

LBJ carried Oklahoma in '64. He was the last Democratic candidate to do so. McCain---despite his lack of attractiveness as a candidate---got 66 percent of the Oklahoma vote and lost nary a county.

Johnson, in '64, nationally, got 61.1 percent of the popular vote to Goldwater's 38.5 percent (a small portion went to the fringe.) That's a 22.6 percent margin.

Johnson got 85.5 percent of the vote in Washington, D.C. Imagine that. The author of the Great Society got nearly every vote in Federal City.

Goldwater won but 6 states. One of them was his home state of Arizona, which he won by the slightest of margins. He only got 50.4 percent of the vote. Beyond Arizona, Goldwater carried 5 states in the deep south. Johnson won everything else, racking up 486 electoral votes.

That's a landslide.

Now the key point here is that four years after winning by one of the biggest margins ever, LBJ couldn't get elected dog catcher. Figuring he couldn't even get his own party's nomination for reelection, he just up and quit.

I watched one of those shows the other day, I think it was Matthews, in which a question was put to the panel of pundits. The question: Who would emerge as the "anti-Obama" voice? The majority said Rush Limbaugh. But one gave a more interesting answer. He said Limbaugh would be part of it, but the liberals would be the other part.

I agree. Obama's eloquent mouth wrote an awful lot of checks during the campaign---an awful lot of checks for which there are insufficient funds. Promising the world on a platter to get elected is one thing; delivering on those promises is quite another.

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