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Lyndon Johnson: Campaign Innovator?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Bruce E. Altschuler
Bruce E. Altschuler*
Affiliation:
State University of New York at Oswego
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Extract

Because most of the discussion of the second volume of Robert Caro's (1990) biography of Lyndon Johnson has focused either on his charge that Johnson's victory over Coke Stevenson in the 1948 Texas Senate election was gained through fraud or on the accuracy of the extremely negative picture of Johnson as compared to the heroic portrait of Stevenson, other important issues have been overlooked. In his introduction, Caro writes that he has devoted so much attention to the 1948 campaign because it “was the new politics against the old. Johnson was the new politics: electronic politics, technological politics, media politics.” These new techniques included “scientific polling, techniques of organization and of media manipulation,” whose effectiveness was demonstrated “so convincingly that thereafter all politicians who could afford them adopted them” (xxxii–xxxiii).

Even though the image of Lyndon Johnson as a pioneer in the development of campaign technology is at odds with what has previously been written about him, most reviewers largely accepted Caro's assertion at face value.

Type
Research Article
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , March 1991 , pp. 42 - 45
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1991

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