Politics & Power Quote by Lyndon B. Johnson

It’s a blunt, borderline schoolyard line with the steel of incumbency behind it: you can dislike me, doubt me, even despise me, but you’re stuck with me. Johnson’s genius was often less about soaring rhetoric than about power’s real grammar - leverage, scarcity, the closed-door squeeze. “I’m the only president you’ve got” is scarcity as argument, a reminder that the office isn’t a menu and politics isn’t a customer-service desk.

The intent is twofold. First, it’s a demand for compliance: fall in line, because no alternative can act with the same authority or deliver the same bargains. Second, it’s a preemptive strike against moral posturing. Johnson is implying that criticism, however righteous, doesn’t change the fact that governing requires a single hand on the wheel, and his is the only one available.

The subtext carries Johnson’s particular brand of intimacy and menace. He’s not asking for admiration; he’s asking for submission to reality. He frames the presidency as a monopoly, not a romance. That framing also smuggles in a threat: weaken me and you weaken the country’s ability to do anything at all - pass civil rights laws, manage crises, prosecute a war, or end one.

Context matters because Johnson governed at a moment when the limits of presidential power were colliding with the myth of presidential mastery: civil rights victories alongside Vietnam escalation, domestic ambition alongside public unraveling. The line works because it’s both true and evasive. It admits the loneliness of the job while quietly converting that loneliness into a shield against accountability.