Who was worse, Lyndon Johnson or Jimmy Carter?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

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

Tough call

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

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

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.

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.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

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.

And judging by the usually profoundly mediocre results when 'experts' are put in charge of those things, thank God for that.

LBJ caring about people was always to a greater or lesser extent conditional and influenced by real or perceived expedience, of course.