Summary Of Client America By Michael Nelson

Michael Nelson wrote Resilient America: Electing Nixon in 1968, Channeling Dissent, and Dividing Government. His book analyzes the presidential election in 1968. This troublesome year showed the divide in American society and the political atmosphere of the era. The 1964 election displayed success for the Republicans at the local level, but the national level was dominated by the Democrats. President Lyndon B. Johnson and his running mate Senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota claimed victory in the 1964 presidential election, after the assassination of President John Kennedy in 1963. They collected forty-five states with 486 electoral votes. This includes nine states Democrats had not won since Franklin Roosevelt. Johnson won the popular

Their candidate, Goldwater dropped to 6 percent of their vote. This is due to the Democratic Party passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Goldwater is considered to the most conservative presidential nominee in a major party in history. Goldwater was divisive and did not put any effort to uniting the Republican Party. He also was a controversial figure by claiming a nuclear weapon should be used to stop the North Vietnam’s supply lines to China. His candidacy became the issue of the campaign. Johnson did not run his campaign on ideological grounds. Instead, he run as a safe alternative to Goldwater and he did well with blacks, whites, men, women, labor, Protestants, Catholics, Jews, young and old, and moderate liberals. Although conservatives lost, they claimed they were not represented well because of Goldwater’s radical ideology on nuclear weapons. Roald Reagan supported Goldwater by giving a national televised speech a week before the election. This gave hope to the conservative movement of support for other elections

In his state of the union address, he told Congress what he wanted to do. Johnson was influenced by Roosevelt’s New Deal to start the war on poverty. In March of 1965, the Congress passed the Appalachian Regional Development Act to assist the poorest in the nation. A month later, they passed the first major federal aid program for elementary and secondary education. In June, they passed two major health care legislations. Medicare was created to assist the elderly and Medicaid was enacted of the impoverished. In August, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, establish the Department of Urban Housing and Development, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In the fall, legislation was passed for reducing the pollution in water and automobiles, opened borders to more people to enter the United States, cleaned the national highways, and provided financial support for college students. Hundreds of new laws were conceived in 1966, including Urban Mass Transportation Act, Highway and Motor Vehicle Safety acts, the creation of the Department of Transportation, federal minimum wage increase, Model Cities Act, Clean Water Restoration Act, and Truth-in-Packaging and Truth-In-Labeling acts. The Voting Rights Act was in response of the nationally televised police brutality of the peaceful