Obama is no LBJ

WASHINGTON -- Where is Lyndon Johnson now that we need him?

No, not the LBJ who escalated our involvement in the Vietnam War longer than anyone expected. Rather, the one who on domestic matters made the Oval Office rather than Capitol Hill the undeniable power center in Washington.

As the former Senate Majority Leader who raised a combination of arm-twisting and cajoling to an art form, Johnson never left doubt about who was in charge. When he called a White House meeting of congressional leaders, they came and stayed. Walking out on LBJ was unthinkable.

The man had the rare quality of being bully one moment and romancer the next, but when it came to personal relations he knew what he wanted and was going to get it. The LBJ nose-to-nose "treatment" was famous, or infamous if you didn't want to be on the receiving end.

As can be said about many of our television talk-show motormouths, he could talk a dog off a meat wagon. But his success was more than in his persuasiveness. As a longtime master of the ways of Congress and the various routes to compromise, Johnson was always one step ahead of the other chess players in substance as well as in style.

To put it with the bark off, Old Lyndon was one intimidating SOB. As Republican political consultant Stuart Spencer once told colleague Ed Rollins after he was subjected to the wrath of another of LBJ's ilk, Nancy Reagan: "She smelled fear all over you." So it also was with Lyndon, and he knew how to make the most of it.

Which brings us to the current occupant of the Oval Office, and his role in trying to wrestle approval from Congress to raise the federal debt ceiling. It can be said, as Dan Quayle was once reminded after he had compared himself to John Kennedy, that Barack Obama is no LBJ.

Unlike Johnson, Obama regularly seems ready to give away the store with his preaching on compromise before belatedly trying to play Mr. Tough Guy. Although like LBJ he is impressively tall and self-controlled in appearance, he sends out no sparks of peril toward his adversaries. As Little Red Riding Hood might sing, who's afraid of the big bad wolf?

Ideal leadership, to be sure, should come from the merits of one's positions on issues, views and arguments, not from mere browbeating. But Johnson usually showed in his dealings with his old colleagues in Congress that he understood viscerally what their own motivations were and how to cope with them.

Obama in his abbreviated one term in the U.S. Senate acquired few of the friendships (or enemies) on Capitol Hill, nor anywhere near the legislative experience, of his predecessor in the White House. Above all, however, the respect, often grudging, Johnson earned on the Hill has not in any comparable measure come to Obama so far.

What has been most striking in the last days of the debt-limit fight threatening to bring the country to the brink is how House Speaker John Boehner has managed to shift the battleground from the White House to Capitol Hill.

Boehner may be having his troubles with the tea party Republicans, but he has succeeded in putting himself on a level with Obama in public perception of the fight. Meanwhile, the president, in conceding that only Congress can raise the limit, has relegated himself and his office to second banana as the crisis has grown.

One way to bring the debate back to his court would be by invoking the Constitution's 14th Amendment, which says, "The validity of the public debt of the United States ... shall not be questioned." The reference was to Civil War debts, but some House Democrats want Obama to sign an executive order based on it to raise the limit himself.

Former President Bill Clinton has said he agrees, but White House press secretary Jay Carney has dismissed the idea, saying there is "no off-ramp" to escape the dilemma. Bumping the constitutional question to the Supreme Court would at least buy time. If LBJ were in the Oval Office, he probably would grab it.

Tribune Media Services columnist Jules Witcover's email address is juleswitcover@comcast.net.