Wash. Monthly: "Ask Not! Why Obama Is No JFK"

Forum Name General Discussion: Primaries
Topic subject Wash. Monthly: "Ask Not! Why Obama Is No JFK"
Topic URL http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x4285717#4285717
4285717, Wash. Monthly: "Ask Not! Why Obama Is No JFK"
Posted by bidenista on Wed Jan-30-08 08:09 AM

This is not a hit piece, but it is critical of the JFK/Obama comparison which we're seeing everywhere. Some interesting historical material on JFK for his fans:



Ask Not!
Why Obama is No JFK
By Ted Widmer

John F. Kennedy is not running for anything in 2008, but you’d never know it. A front-page photo in the New York Times recently showed his electability in Serbia, of all places, where local candidates are vying to establish their credentials as the latest citizens of the New Frontier. Back in the U.S., no candidate has captured the reflected glory of JFK more than Barack Obama, thanks to his youth, eloquence, and message of change. 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.Subscribe Online & Save 33%

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.

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

every time I see this.

Some Obamababy posted a pic of JFK and Obama next to each other in GD--P using the title The Torch is Passed or some nonsense and I was so outraged I had to leave the computer and go calm down. This is one subject that turns me into the Alien monster.

Yes I know, his daughter said "A president like my father", which baffles, bewilders and confuses the living hell out of me. I don't understand it on any level. I don't understand where Caroline sees this. I can't go too deeply into this, after all, it is HER father, but Good God up in His heaven, where does she see the comparison?? What am I missing here? I am exactly the same age as Caroline. I have read hundreds and hundreds of books on JFK, have every conceivable doc. on VHS and DVD on him, been doing this since I was about 10, no lie, my deceased father put me onto him, and I cannot for the life of me see ANY comparison to Obama. I sponsored a conference on him, ran a newsletter, I mean I'm in this JFK stuff deep, and if I saw a comparison, Id gladly admit it. I just don't.

Frankly, it offends me.