In reply to Chuck.

The thing about black anti-gay voters and Prop 8, I don't think holds up. It might be the case that if no blacks voted, the amendment wouldn't pass--but by the same token, if no men voted, it wouldn't pass, and you don't see people claiming that high male turnout was the problem.

The comparison to LBJ is not to the LBJ who was pushing for the Civil Rights Act as President (while running against Goldwater and Wallace right after the Kennedy assassination; let's just say Johnson wasn't running too much of a personal political risk, regardless of what he did to the Democratic party.) The comparison is to the LBJ of the Senate, who went far further than Obama ever has--he was a race-baiter, whose first major Senate speech was a defense of the filibuster's use to strike down Truman's proposed anti-lynching act. (Read about it starting at the bottom of the page here.) This is the guy who sent Eisenhower's 1957 civil rights bill to a committee headed by James Eastand to have all of the enforcement provisions pulled out. The result was that LBJ got to say he'd passed civil rights legislation while in the senate without actually pissing off any Southern Democrats. He pushed for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and spoke eloquently in its favor, because he thought he could get it passed. (And he got it passed, and it was a huge deal!) But he didn't do anything to hurt his political chances in 1949 or 1957. Anyway, to be clear, that's the comparison, and if anything Obama will come out looking better if he gets anything important done in his second term; he never won an election by smearing gays, while Johnson used racism to ingratiate himself with powerful Southern Democrats and build his own political power. (And that power is what allowed him to jam through the Civil Rights Act as President, and around and around we go.)

I agree with the rest of what you're saying; I just wanted the point of the Johnson comparison to be clear.