This is what I mean when I say that Democrats who still think they're in the party of Harry Truman have lost all sense of the changes that have occurred over the last several decades. Today's Democratic Party platform would not have been intelligible to Democrats in the 1950s or 1960s. John F. Kennedy's speech here could have been made by Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan today. And we haven't even mentioned the "social issues."
But would Kennedy himself remained the JFK of the early '60s, or would he have "evolved" along with the rest of the party?
ReplyDeleteJFK was a playboy who achieved nothing as a senator except the highest absentee/missed vote rate year after year. His fellow senators, quite reasonably, despised him as a slacker and a rich man's wastrel son. The people who worship his presidency nowadays are ignoramuses. The old rummy journalists and vainglorious Harvard satraps who created the bogus legend of JFK so that they could milk it like a prize guernsey and retire as country gentlemen are frauds, who in better days would have been subjected to a public caning.
ReplyDeletec matt,
ReplyDeleteI think there's little doubt his views would have "evolved," just as Obama has said his views on same-sex "marriage" have. JFK had little to root him firmly in principle, as his private life testifies.
"Wizard of Ooze" Everett Dirksen (ha-ha), Ralph, I love your description of JFK -- "Harvard satraps who created the bogus legend of JFK os that they could milk it like a prize guernsey ..."
Which reminds me, next time you're in a bookstore, check out the kids' books section for a book on Mr. Obama that does precisely that. It's amazing, complete with pictures of him with bowed head in a church wiping away tears ... It's reminiscent of what they did in China with Chairman Mao and in North Korea with Kim Jong-Il. Nauseating.