“Well, what’s the hell’s the presidency for? So asked President Lyndon Johnson as he sat with key advisers at his kitchen table.  They were working on Johnson’s speech to Congress right after Kennedy’s assassination. From Gary Younge’s  Guardian report: The nation was still in grief and Johnson was not yet able to move into the White House because Kennedys’ effects were still there.”

As they sat there discussing what to put in the speech, one of his wise, practical advisors around the table spoke up on the civil rights issue, saying: “The presidency has only a certain amount of coinage to expend, and you oughtn’t to expand on this since it has no chance of passing.”

Johnson sat in silence at the kitchen table as his aides debated.  Finally Johnson spoke up:  “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?”

In his speech to Congress a few days later Johnson said this:  “First, no memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kenney’s memory that the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long.”Five years later he signed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, launched the war on poverty and introduced Medicaid and Medicare. That’s what his presidency was for.

Fast forward to 2008.  Mr. Hope and Change,  Barack Obama, spoke volumes on a vision for America: on education, the environment, health care, immigration, economic stability, people power, job growth and manufacturing revival, and all the many things our nations elected leaders should be responding to rather than just the next election and big money interests.

Four years later we have a do-nothing Congress simply engaging in partisan battles over every piece of legislation. Sitting on the sidelines of this “battle of the political parties,” all I see is in-fighting and stagnation, frustration and ridiculous compromise, and too much tail-bone and not enough back-bone.  

This question really grabs my attention: “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?”

McClellan is a resident of Polson