re: #132 petesh

Some of that is personality — LBJ was crude and Reagan smooth; some of it is the era — Johnson and Reagan were both raised inside the kind of implicit racism it’s hard for someone to identify in themselves until they make a major effort. See also Johnson’s sexism, environmental lack of awareness, etc etc. I grew up on “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” but I rate him more generously now.

My mother was from Texas (b. 1913) and she was guilty of using some unfortunate terminology—it’s just what people were raised on. She and my dad were both fanatical New-Deal Democrats, and my mom at least became more and more liberal as she got older. As an example, she was all for Jesse Jackson when he was running for President. So you can’t always go by the vocabulary people picked up when they were young a century ago.