sweet talk 'em and drink their bourbon

Kamala Harris and Joe Biden going back and forth about -- busing (??) ... is kind of like a time warp ... (What year is it?  How did I get here?  South Boston? -- What??)

On Hardball, Chris Matthews seemed to understand Biden's comments as alluding to -- two things:

1.  the history, progress, and change he (Biden) has lived and worked through, as a public servant, and

2.  how -- you had those people -- segregationists from the South -- in the Senate back then and you had to find a way to deal with them.

     Chris Matthews refers to them as "seggies" -- the same way people say "aggies" as slang for agricultural students, or schools.

     He says in his inimitable way, "You had to find a way to work with them, because you needed the votes!  You had to get along -- you had to sweet talk them and drink their bourbon..."


     That line reminded me of Lyndon Johnson:
----------------- [excerpt] ----------- New York Times columnist Russell Baker remembers Johnson...
"...He was a character out of a Russian novel, one of those human complications that filled the imagination of Dostoyevsky, a storm of warring human instincts:  

sinner and saint, buffoon and statesman, cynic and sentimentalist, a man torn between hungers for immortality and self-destruction."


     Johnson, another journalist says, was more complex than any Manichaean picture of him can convey.  He was not a case of good and evil living side by side but of "an unlovable man desperate to be loved, whose cynicism and idealism were mysteriously inseparable, all of a piece."  

This journalist quotes Robert Penn Warren's observation in All the King's Men:  "A man's virtue may be the defect of his desire, as his crime may be but a function of his virtue."  Lyndon Johnson was a study in ambiguity. ------------------------------------- [end, excerpt - Introduction / Lone Star Rising, Robert Dallek's biography of Johnson]

     I don't know about all of that, but I can imagine back in the day, if there was a deal to be made, LBJ would give as good as he got with the sweet-talk, and he would bring the bourbon....

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