Politics & Power Quote by Lyndon B. Johnson

Johnson’s barnyard simile is doing two jobs at once: it punctures the glamour of the office, and it quietly reasserts his authority by portraying endurance as the real presidential skill. A “jackass” is stubborn, a little ridiculous, and useful mostly because it keeps going. Drop it into a “hailstorm” and you get a presidency stripped of ceremony and control. Hail doesn’t negotiate. It pelts. You can’t outmaneuver weather; you can only absorb it.

The line’s bite comes from how it recasts power as exposure. The president, supposedly the most protected person in the country, is framed as the most publicly vulnerable - a big target in an open field. Johnson isn’t claiming nobility; he’s claiming bruises. That’s a deliberate inversion of heroic leadership myths, especially potent in the mid-1960s, when the job became a live-fire exercise: Vietnam escalating, civil rights legislation tearing open old political alignments, riots, backlash, a press corps learning to hunt in packs. Even his legislative genius couldn’t “do” much about the fact that history was arriving at high velocity.

Subtext: this is also self-defense. By insisting there’s “nothing to do,” Johnson smuggles in an argument about limits - the limits of agency, of messaging, of any one man’s capacity to master events. It’s gallows humor with a purpose: if the public wants a magician, he offers a battered animal instead, daring you to admit you wanted the wrong thing from the start.