Ask Not! Why Obama is No JFK

[crud76]

<snip>

The Kennedy-Obama parallel has been played up by the press, and Obama’s campaign has not discouraged those comparisons—indeed, it has brought in Ted Sorensen, JFK’s talented speechwriter, to make speeches and render the judgment of history.

But the comparison falls short when voters consider the key question for 2008: foreign policy experience. It’s true that Obama, like Kennedy, is a youngish senator (at 46, three years older than Kennedy when he ran for president), but the parallel falters after that. The more one looks into Kennedy’s lifelong preparation for the job, the more one realizes how misleading it was, then and now, to describe him as inexperienced. Everyone who has stressed Kennedy’s youth, from Dan Quayle in 1988 to Obama today, has bumped up against the uncomfortable fact that JFK was an extremely well-informed statesman in 1960. As Lloyd Bentsen reminded us in the zinger that pole-axed Quayle, the truth was a lot more complicated than the myth.

Kennedy, of course, was a decorated veteran of World War Two, which he fought in the South Pacific. But before and after the conflict, he had acquired travel experiences that most people take a lifetime to accumulate, richly detailed in biographies like Robert Dallek’s An Unfinished Life. His father was ambassador to the United Kingdom in the pivotal year 1938, and young Kennedy was in the audience of the House of Commons as the Munich deal was furiously debated (the experience shaped his first book, Why England Slept). As a young man, he made American officials uneasy with his relentless desire to see parts of Europe and the world that few Americans ever encountered. In 1939 alone, he took in the Soviet Union, Romania, Turkey, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Greece, France, Germany, Italy and Czechoslovakia. As the war was ending, he attended the San Francisco conference that created the United Nations, filing seventeen dispatches for the Chicago Herald American.

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http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2008/0801w.widmer.html

[Bitwit1234]

1. This is the truest statement ever made here.

[Benhurst]

2. You're obviously one of those reality-based people we've been warned

about.

Don't rain on our parade with facts.

Truth and reality mean nothing.

We are entering a new age of Hope and Cooperation.

So there!

[izzie]

3. No He isa man of this time. I do not want Kennedy back any more

than I want another Bush of Clinton. Lets move on people.

[xchrom]

4. recommend

[AX10]

5. It's true.

Also, the idea that the Kennedy aura is going to elect anyone these days to a national office if absurd. This is a different time with different challenges.

[stillcool]

6. We need new rules!!

The daughter, the brother, and the nephew.... of JFK had the gall to make a comparison. They really should not give their opinion. Actually no one should endorse a candidate. Polls are not good either. Polls should be banned. Accurate vote tabulations should not be advocated for either. But if a vote is ever called into question, and your candidate does not insist on counting votes that can't be counted he should be vilified for the rest of his life.

[Scriptor Ignotus]

7. what's the point of this article?

that Obama is not EXACTLY like JFK? Yes, we realize that. He is Barack Obama, not John Kennedy.

Meanwhile, JFK's daughter and brother endorsed Obama. Maybe the author of this magazine or Robert Dallek knew JFK better than they did. Only time will tell.