The leadership shrug is a remarkable new political gesture.
Members of Congress who declared their opposition to Lyndon Johnson’s most important legislative priorities tended to be woken by phone calls in the middle of the night from an angry president. Johnson was fond of physiological imagery, so members of his party who declared their independence would hear that he planned to cut their throats or alter their sexual anatomy. In profane rants, holdouts learned that federal spending for things like highways was about to become quite scarce in their district or their state, and everyone back home was going to know who had caused the sudden money drought with his stupidity.
