Barney Frank is quoted in The Hill as saying

(Newt Gingrich) would be the best thing to happen to Democrats since Barry Goldwater (link)

Take Newt Gingrich out of the equation. Democrats may have benefited from Barry Goldwater, but the country sure didn’t. We got Lyndon Johnson instead. His time as president was horrible. He escalated the Vietnam War. Riots broke out around the country. Leaders were being assassinated (RFK, MLK).  The stock market went into a stall that took over 15 years to get going again. The DOW Jones Industrial Average was 902 on Jan 4th, 1965. It was 888 on Jan 4th 1982. By my measure, LBJ was horrible for the country.

So what is good for Democrats is bad for the rest of us.

From Walter Russell Mead’s Blog

1. Vietnam…More than 50,000 Americans and many more Vietnamese died as a result of that policy; our country was bitterly divided in ways that still weaken us today, and the economic cost of the war was immense.
2. The Medicare/Medicaid complex…Thanks to these programs, we have a health system that marries the greed of the private sector to the ineptitude of government, and unless we can somehow tame these beasts America and everything it stands for could be lost.
3. War on Poverty…Since the Great Society era of Lyndon Johnson, the country has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into poor urban neighborhoods.  The violence and crime generated in these neighborhoods costs hundreds of billions more.  And after all this time, all this money and all this energy, the inner city populations are worse off than before.  There is more drug addiction and more social and family breakdown among this population than when the Great Society was launched.  Incarceration rates have risen to levels that shock the world (though they make for safer streets); the inner city abortion rate has reached levels that must surely appall even the most resolute pro-choicers not on the Planned Parenthood payroll.

Read the history of urbanization as the underpinning of the true problems in our inner cities and why the War on Poverty is an expensive intellectual folly.

You can’t fix a problem if you don’t know (and not even looking for) the cause of the problem.