Ask Not What J.F.K. Can Do for Obama writePost(); if (acm.cc)
acm.cc.write(); By FRANK RICH
Published: February 3, 2008
BEFORE John F. Kennedy was a president, a legend, a myth and a poltergeist
stalking Americas 2008 campaign, he was an upstart contender seen as a risky
bet for the Democratic nomination in 1960.
Barry Blitt
if (acm.rc) acm.rc.write(); Kennedy was judged an ambitious but
superficial playboy by his liberal peers, according to his biographer Robert
Dallek. He never said a word of importance in the Senate, and he never did a
thing, in the authoritative estimation of the Senates master, Lyndon Johnson.
Adlai Stevenson didnt much like Kennedy, and neither did Harry Truman, who
instead supported Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri.
J. F. K. had few policy prescriptions beyond Democratic boilerplate (a higher
minimum wage, comprehensive housing legislation). As his speechwriter Richard
Goodwin recalled in his riveting 1988 memoir Remembering America, Kennedys
main task was to prove his political viability. He had to persuade his party
that he was not a wealthy dilettante and not too young, too inexperienced and,
above all, too Catholic to be president.
How did the fairy-tale prince from Camelot vanquish a field of heavyweights
led by the longtime liberal warrior Hubert Humphrey? It wasnt ideas. It
certainly wasnt experience. It wasnt even the charisma that Kennedy would
show off in that falls televised duels with Richard Nixon.
Looking back almost 30 years later, Mr. Goodwin summed it up this way: He
had to touch the secret fears and ambivalent longings of the American heart,
divine and speak to the desires of a swiftly changing nation his message
grounded on his own intuition of some vague and spreading desire for national
renewal.
In other words, Kennedy needed two things. He needed poetry, and he needed a
country with some desire, however vague, for change.
Mr. Goodwin and his fellow speechwriter Ted Sorensen helped with the poetry.
Still, the placid America of 1960 was not obviously in the market for change.
The outgoing president, Ike, was the most popular incumbent since F. D. R. The
suburban boom was as glossy as it is now depicted in the television show Mad
Men. The Red Panic of the McCarthy years was in temporary remission.
But Kennedys intuition was right. Americas boundless self-confidence was
being rattled by (as yet) low-grade fevers: the surprise Soviet technological
triumph of Sputnik; anti-American riots in even friendly non-Communist
countries; the arrest of Martin Luther King Jr. at an all-white restaurant in
Atlanta; the inexorable national shift from manufacturing to white-collar jobs.
Kennedy bet his campaign on, as he put it, the single assumption that the
American people are uneasy at the present drift in our national course and
that they have the will and strength to start the United States moving again.
For all the Barack Obama-J. F. K. comparisons, whether legitimate or
over-the-top, what has often been forgotten is that Mr. Obamas weaknesses
resemble Kennedys at least as much as his strengths. But to compensate for
those shortcomings, he gets an extra benefit that J. F. K. lacked in 1960.
Theres nothing vague about the publics desire for national renewal in 2008,
with a reviled incumbent in the White House and only 19 percent of the
population finding the country on the right track, according to the last Wall
Street Journal-NBC News poll. America is screaming for change.
Either of the two Democratic contenders will swing the pendulum. Their
marginal policy differences notwithstanding, they are both orthodox liberals.
As the partys voters in 22 states step forward on Tuesday, the overriding
question they face, as defined by both contenders, is this: Which brand of
change is more likely, in Kennedys phrase, to get America moving again?
Lost in the hoopla over the Teddy and Caroline Kennedy show last week was the
parallel endorsement of Hillary Clinton by three of Robert Kennedys children.
In a Los Angeles Times op-ed article, they answered this paramount question as
many Clinton supporters do (and as many John Edwards supporters also did). The
loftiest poetry wont solve Americas crises, they wrote. Change can be
achieved only by a president willing to engage in a fistfight.
That both Clintons are capable of fistfighting is beyond doubt, at least on
their own behalf in a campaign. But Mrs. Clinton isnt always a fistfighter
when governing. Theres a reason why Robert Kennedys children buried the Iraq
war in a single clause (and never used the word Iraq) deep in their
endorsement. They know that their uncle Teddy, unlike Mrs. Clinton, raised his
fists to lead the Senate fight against the Iraq misadventure at the start. They
know too that less than six months after Mission Accomplished, Senator
Kennedy called the war a fraud and voted against pouring more money into it.
Senator Clinton raised a hand, not a fist, to vote aye.
In what she advertises as 35 years of fighting for Americans, Mrs. Clinton
can point to some battles won. But many of them were political campaigns for
Bill Clinton: seven even before his 1992 presidential run. The fistfighting
required if she is president may also often be political. As Mrs. Clinton
herself says, she has been in marathon combat against the Republican attack
machine. Its antipathy will be increased exponentially by the co-president who
would return to the White House with her on Day One.
Its legitimate to wonder whether sweeping policy change can be accomplished
on that polarized a battlefield. A Clinton presidency may end up a Democratic
mirror image of Karl Roves truculent style of G.O.P. governance: a 50 percent
plus 1 majority. Seven years on, that formula has accomplished little for the
country beyond extending and compounding the mistake of invading Iraq. As was
illustrated by the long catalog of unfinished business in President Bushs
final State of the Union address, this has not been a presidency that, as Mrs.
Clinton said of L. B. J.s, got things done.
The rap on Mr. Obama remains that he preaches the audacity of Kumbaya. He is
all lofty poetry and no action, so obsessed with transcending partisanship that
he can be easily rolled. Implicit in this criticism is a false choice that
voters have to choose between his pretty words on one hand and Mrs. Clintons
combative, wonky incrementalism on the other.
Theres a third possibility, of course: A poetically gifted president might
be able to bring about change without relying on fistfighting as his primary
modus operandi. Mr. Obama argues that if he can bring some Republicans along,
he can achieve changes larger than the microinitiatives that have been a
hallmark of Clintonism. He also suggests, in his most explicit policy
invocation of J. F. K., that he can enlist the young en masse in a push for
change by ramping up national service programs like AmeriCorps and the Peace
Corps.
His critics argue back that he is a naïve wuss who will give away the store.
They have mocked him for offering to hold health-care negotiations so
transparent (and presumably feckless) that they can be broadcast on C-Span.
Obama supporters point out that Mrs. Clintons behind-closed-doors 1993
health-care task force was a fiasco.
A better argument might be that transparency could help smoke out the
special-interest players hiding in Washingtons crevices. Youd never know from
Mrs. Clintons criticisms of subprime lenders that one of the most notorious,
Countrywide, was a client as recently as October of Burson-Marsteller, the
public relations giant where her chief strategist, Mark Penn, is the sitting
chief executive. Other high-level operatives in her campaign belong to Dewey
Square Group, an outfit that just last year provided lobbying services for
Countrywide.
The question about Mr. Obama, of course, is whether he is tough enough to
stand up to those in Washington who oppose real reform, whether Republicans or
special-interest advocates like, say, Mr. Penn. The jury is certainly out,
though Mr. Obama has now started to toughen his critique of the Clintons
without sounding whiny. By framing that debate as a choice between the future
and the past, he is revisiting the J. F. K. playbook against Ike.
What we also know is that, unlike Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Obama is not hesitant to
take on John McCain. He has twice triggered the McCain temper, in spats over
ethics reform in 2006 and Mr. McCains Baghdad market photo-op last year. In
Thursdays debate, Mr. Obama led an attack on Mr. McCain twice before Mrs.
Clinton followed with a wan echo. When Bill Clinton promised that his wife and
Mr. McCains friendship would ensure a civilized campaign, he may have been
revealing more than he intended about the perils for Democrats in that matchup.
As Tuesdays vote looms, all thats certain is that todays pollsters and
pundits have so far gotten almost everything wrong. Mr. McCains campaign had
been declared dead. Mrs. Clinton has gone from invincible to near-death to
near-invincible again. Mr. Obama was at first not black enough to sweep black
votes and then too black to get a sizable white vote in South Carolina.
Richard Goodwin knew in 1960 that all it took was a single significant
failure by Kennedy or an act of political daring by his opponents for his
man to lose especially in the general election, where he faced the vastly
more experienced Nixon, the designated heir of a popular president. Thats as
good a snapshot as any of where we are right now, while we wait for the voters
to decide if they will take what Mrs. Clinton correctly describes as a leap of
faith and follow another upstart on to a new frontier.
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