Who was worse, Lyndon Johnson or Jimmy Carter?

[AggregateDemand]

Country-bumpkin peanut farmer with decent intentions vs. Machiavellian racist liberal technocrat

Tough call

[AggregateDemand]

I have never, ever heard Johnson called a 'liberal technocrat' before.

Feel free to create any pejorative you like. He was the Machiavellian machine politician, who wanted to use New Deal politics, during a time of relative prosperity, to buy constituents with federal handouts. Nixon thought it was corrupt, contemptible, and utterly brilliant so he tried to steal it for Keynesian Republicans.

We've never recovered. Divisive political rancor and fiscal malfeasance ever since.

[AggregateDemand]

Even if that were true--I happen to interpret Johnson as having cared about poor whites and to an extent poor Hispanics much more genuinely than about pretty much any other group to which he pandered, for what that's worth in the context of the War on Poverty--that's not what 'liberal technocrat' means.

I called him a technocrat because because of the new bureaucracies he created, but who am I kidding? We don't put scientists in charge of medicine, welfare sociology, or ag production. Those jobs are reserved for political hacks who are owed a favor.

LBJ sent uneducated poor people to 'Nam, and told his generals to fight according to presidential approval polls. If that's affection, I don't want to think about his wrath. He blocked Civil Rights when Ike was in office, too. I have a hard time believing that LBJ took America's downtrodden classes seriously.