The End of Texas Dominance
From LBJ to Obama
By ROBERT BRYCE

Barack Obama’s historic win has enormous significance for America and its image. It has changed how America sees itself and it has, thankfully, changed how the rest of the world sees America.

But Obama’s election is also concrete proof of the enduring triumph of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. Obama’s win is the consummation of two pieces of legislation that Johnson forced through Congress: the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Four decades after Johnson left the White House to return to Texas, his voice, his conscience, reverberates in America. The irony is that while Obama’s win was made possible by Johnson, it also marks the end of Texas’s dominance of modern American presidential politics.

Obama ascendance comes at the cost of Texas influence. George W. Bush, the least-popular president in the history of polling, is likely to be the last Texas president for a long time. Obama’s successful campaign was largely based on an effort to tie John McCain to the unpopular Bush at every opportunity. Obama’s single most effective TV commercial may have been the one that shows McCain himself saying that he voted with Bush 90 percent of the time.

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