But we look back now, and we realize the Great Society was not a success.
65 immigration acts went through right at the time of the Great Society program. So pre-1970 immigrants - and that's basically when it kicked in - pre-1970 immigrants, 30% went home. They couldn't make it.
I was a Great Society liberal on domestic issues. People ask me, 'How do you go from Walter Mondale to Fox News?' The answer is, 'I was young once.' End of answer.
Lyndon Johnson was a profoundly insecure man who feared dissent and craved reassurance. In 1964 and 1965, Johnson's principal goals were to win the presidency in his own right and to pass his Great Society legislation through Congress.
After Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, the belief in decent housing as a political right or social obligation was supplanted in the U.S. by the notion that suitable shelter should be an act of charity.
One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society... shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.
Lyndon Johnson, his 44-state landslide in 1964 and Great Society notwithstanding, was by 1968 a failed president being repudiated in the primaries of his own party.
It is incumbent upon each of us to improve spending and savings practices to ensure our own individual financial security and preserve the collective economic well-being of our great society.
I do think the Obama agenda is the furthest left agenda we've seen since probably LBJ and the Great Society. And the differences have been that instead of him trying to go center-left, he's gone - in my estimation - more left. He's shown the country a much more aggressive liberal, more European style agenda, and that's on a center-right country.
The Great Society wanted to make America look like a country in which Little Rock could never have happened. It failed because it was a venture in denial rather than in realistic social transformation.
