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Ted Sorensen, the speechwriter and special counsel to President John F. Kennedy endorsed Senator Barack Obama tonight and compared Obama’s campaign to Kennedy’s run almost half a century earlier.
“The campaigns are comparable,” Sorenson said in an interview after his speech, which was delivered to a closed $1,000-a-head fundraiser at the Grand Hyatt Hotel, and which left guests buzzing over what several said was an implied comparison to Kennedy. “They say he’s too young, he’s too inexperienced, his demographic is wrong to get elected. They’ve decided in Washington that he doesn’t have a chance. But the campaign isn’t going on in Washington. The campaign is going on in the grassroots.”
Sorenson also sharply rebuked legislators who voted to authorize the Iraq war, a group that includes Senator Hillary Clinton and former Senator John Edwards.
“Members of either party who authorized this disaster should be accountable,” Sorenson said. “ didn’t have to vote for it, and moderate his position, and come up with an alternate strategy . He didn’t have to come up non-binding resolutions and so forth.”
Sorenson suggested a campaign slogan: “Obama: Right from the start.”
The Kennedy speechwriter does not always become involved in Democratic primary politics, though he helped Wesley Clark briefly in 2004. He said he couldn’t recall throwing himself this thoroughly behind a campaign since Gary Hart’s 1984 run.
He stopped short of comparing Obama personally to the 35th president.
“We won’t really know the answer to that question until Obama is president and faced with governing,” he said. “His judgment will be tested on the campaign, but not the way it will be tested in the White House.”
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