Nov 2, 2013 3 min read

It’s hard to think of two presidents who are more dissimilar than Lyndon Johnson and Barack Obama.

Setting aside their obvious differences in ethnicity and background, their temperaments and managerial styles are, according to historians and contemporary news reports, diametrically opposed: Where Johnson was notorious for his appetites, displays of anger and self-pity and sometimes crude personal habits, Obama is all discipline, elan and cool reserve; Obama is a master rhetorician, where Johnson was a plodding speaker; Johnson reveled in the wheeling and dealing of the legislative process, which he knew on a detailed level after having been on Capitol Hill for 20 years before moving to the executive branch, while Obama was in the U.S. Senate for just two years before launching a presidential bid. Johnson would aggressively arm-twist and cajole legislators, while Obama is said to hold them at arms-length. Some stories indicate he has only intermittently communicated even with some allies in the U.S. House and Senate. It’s been pegged by some observers as a distaste for the blood and grit of lawmaking.

The notion that Obama is a “bystander president” could very well be what New York magazine columnist Frank Rich has termed “the lazy conventional Beltway wisdom of the moment.” And while Johnson did a great deal of good as president, his mercurial nature undermined his presidency in ways both large and small.

Nonetheless, this might be the moment for Obama to borrow some tricks from the LBJ playbook.

On the eve of the first anniversary of his re-election, Obama has had a rough couple of months, to say the least. The economy is moving forward at the rate of a weary tortoise. His approach on whether to intervene in Syria was widely perceived to be stumbling, even though it ultimately brought a favorable resolution. There has been a steady stream of revelations about the scope of NSA spying, and the implementation of the Affordable Care Act has been glitch-riddled. That the White House has countered the embarrassing developments regarding the NSA and the health care law with protests that Obama was not in the know about these problems has only served to make him look excessively removed from doings within his own administration.

As New York Times columnist Gail Collins notes on this page today, just about every president who has been fortunate enough to win two terms has sailed through choppy waters as they headed to the lame-duck sunset. Perhaps the problems with the federal government’s insurance exchanges will be remedied, economic growth will gather speed and Obama’s current woes will be forgotten as the media and public move on to other preoccupations.

The president might be able to hasten the arrival of that moment, though, if he adopts a little bit more of Johnson’s willingness to get in the trenches with the lawmakers who decide the fate of his initiatives. He could also use the bully pulpit more forcefully to win the public over to his side; he won re-election by a comfortable margin, but there are times where it seems that his opponents are setting the agenda, particularly when it comes to the nation’s budgetary priorities. As New Yorker columnist George Packer noted last week, “the dominant argument in Washington is over spending cuts, not over ways to increase economic growth and address acute problems like inequality, poor schools, and infrastructure decay.”

When he won the White House five years ago, Obama clearly wished to be a transformative president.

Time is running out to achieve that goal.