National Affairs: No Man Is a Label

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As Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson heads into the opening of the 86th Congress, he has been tabbed by the pundits as a "moderate," whose principal job it will be to rein in the Senate's wild-eyed Democratic "liberals." Such political labels don't fit, says Johnson in the current University of Texas Texas Quarterly: "God made no man so simple or his life so sterile that such experience can be summarized in an adjective ... I am a free man, an American, a United States Senator, and a Democrat, in that order. I am also a liberal, a conservative, a Texan, a taxpayer, a rancher, a businessman, a consumer, a parent, a voter, and not as young [50] as I used to be nor as old as I expect to be—and I am all these things in no fixed order."