Noel Sheppard of Newsbusters spots Rolling Stone comparing — favorably! — Barack Obama to Lyndon Johnson, thus negating the magazine’s entire near half-century of boomer narrative:
With less than three weeks to go before the crucial midterm elections, the folks at Rolling Stone magazine have decided to pen a love letter to Barack Obama clearly in the hopes of motivating readers to get out and vote for Democrats.
Forget about the President’s horrible poll numbers and the feeling by a stunning number of Americans that the country is on the wrong track, the current White House resident has a truly impressive list of accomplishments according to author Tim Dickinson, so much so that he’s the best leader America has had since Lyndon Baines Johnson (h/t NB reader Dave, accompanying spoof cover photo courtesy The Razor):
This president has delivered more sweeping, progressive change in 20 months than the previous two Democratic administrations did in 12 years. “When you look at what will last in history,” historian Doris Kearns Goodwin tells Rolling Stone, “Obama has more notches on the presidential belt.”
In fact, when the history of this administration is written, Obama’s opening act is likely to be judged as more impressive than any president’s — Democrat or Republican — since the mid-1960s. “If you’re looking at the first-two-year legislative record,” says [Norman Ornstein, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute], “you really don’t have any rivals since Lyndon Johnson — and that includes Ronald Reagan.”
Some of you younger kids in the audience might not remember this, but over 40 years ago, there was a small subset of reprimitivist young people who, living off money their parents had accumulated through gainful employment in an economic system its critics dubbed “capitalism,” bitterly protested the anti-communist policies of Lyndon Johnson. This self-described “hippies,” a neologism of “little hipsters,” their 1950s predecessors, received updates on what their favorite musicians were doing, and their own complex, nuanced thoughts on then-President Johnson, via an “underground”, “counter-cultural” magazine called Rolling Stone.
But then, you can only be avant-garde for so long, before you become garde.
What’s next? The New York Times longing wistfully for the days of Richard Nixon? Like that’ll ever happen.
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