I’ll use the Nobel Prize that Carter has on his mantle as my cite in this case.
What’s got to sting the Clintons is that in endorsing Obama, Ted’s backing swings not from the impartial but actually away from them. He was once on their side but has now left. That’s got to carry more weight, to imply more dissatisfaction, than than one coming from the previously unalligned.
I wouldn’t blame Kennedy for a lack of legislation while president. There’s a reason we elect presidents for more than three years and obviously if he’d had two full terms we could likely point to civil rights and possibly some meaningful strategic limitation treaties during his watch. He was though too quick to abandon diplomacy and make overly agressive moves in response to crises that would later limit our abilities to manage smaller events. Here I hope Obama would be a better president. Here his willingness to talk and engage in patient, meaningful deliberations should play better. In today’s climate and given the view in which we as a nation are currently held, it’s absolutely essential.
But surely JFK’s popularity stems considerably from his death? I’m a poor student of even recent U.S. history, but as I understand it whilst he was popular when still alive it’s his untimely murder that really boosted people’s rememberance of him. Likewise, I would have thought that Carter’s popularity (such as it is; I wouldn’t mind a cite for him being the most popular, not because I necessarily disagree, just because I think i’d like to read it) would be something stemming from after his time in office. And I think it’s “Jacques Europe”. 
I would have thought that Nixon’s big change in popularity stemmed from, well, the obvious, and that did make his position pretty untenable. And i’m not talking really in terms of diplomacy, since there’s going to be whoever from the relevant government bodies behind the scenes anyway. I was talking more in terms of having an impressive, presidential President as a face for your country. What people think of them is what they think of America. Like I said, I can understand why you might not be that bothered, I would have thought you’d mind at least a bit about national prestige (or indeed the opposite) being affected by the person in the job. If nothing else it’s going to affect how we vote.
I agree that it shouldn’t be a primary reason for voting one way or the other but it will make it a bit more easier to do business when your largest group of ideological allies doesn’t hate your president’s fucking guts.
So the Nobel prize commitee now speaks for a whole continent of people? Please stop trying to wedge your opinions into this and then calling it fact.
From personal experience I would imagine that it’s Clinton by a mile but I can’t find any actual polls to back that up.
In terms of economic benefit, if Kennedy had done nothing more than spearhead the slashing of marginal tax rates in his two years, that would have been more than Bush has done in eight. You can’t really blame him for the Bay of Pigs because that was Eisenhower’s plan, which the military leadership bungled during execution. Had it worked, Republicans would be grabbing all the Ike-credit they could for liberating Cuba.
He was a leader who set precedent on a staggeringly regular basis. He broke the religion barrier, being the first non-Protestant president. He broke the age barrier, being the youngest president. He appointed the first African-Americans to high level executive offices in a number of positions from FTC Commissioner to Housing Administrator. He unilaterally marshalled the whole weight of the federal government, including military resources, to guarantee the civil rights of African-Americans.
He established the Peace Corps, to this day an outstanding example of volunteerism in the effort to establish peaceful and honest relations with people of other countries. It is a giant and a legend among American charities, not only helping those it serves, but providing life enrichment leadership skills for the young Americans who participate.
He spearheaded the containment of communism in Latin America, establishing the Alliance for Progress. Its lofty libertarian goals included the infusion of capitalism in underdeveloped economies, and the establishment of pricing stability, land ownership, increases in per capita income, and higher adult literacy rates — a critical component of a free market.
He inspired and initiated the development of NASA’s race to the moon in a famous speech that is even greater for its lesser known context of recognizing the nobility of struggle and achievement. He rallied the whole nation in such a way that its support never lagged until a human left a footprint on earth’s neighbor.
He revised immigration policy, and eliminated discrimination against immigrants from African and Asian countries by shifting favorable status away from traditional European and Scandinavian countries. And yet he remained wildly popular in Europe from Ireland to Germany. More than 80 percent of West Berlin’s population turned out for his speech there.
None of this is even counting his policies on everything from the economy to civil rights that Johnson and the Congress carried out on his behalf. I don’t think it’s fair to trivialize Kennedy’s accomplishments which include the very Reaganesque qualities that Republicans (and many Democrats) so admire. Kennedy was a remarkable president. Perfect? No. Great? Yes.
Should they? Defining “effective” as “getting his agenda enacted,” the country would be far better off if GWB had been completely ineffective.
Much of what LBJ accomplished was originally put in train by JFK – e.g., the Civil Rights Act.
Whether JFK would have pulled us out of Vietnam had he lived remains a controversial question; I incline to the view that he would have, and that alone would make him, in hindsight, a better POTUS than LBJ (who would be remembered now as one of our greatest presidents were it not for Vietnam, and who, on taking office, immediately reversed Kennedy’s order to withdraw 1,000 military personnel by the end of 1963).
No question about that. In fact, you could even argue that Kennedy made it all possible on a practical level.
And some mighty crappy ones who were perfect angels.
I agree that in Ireland Clinton is probably way more popular than Carter. But in the rest of Europe Carter’s anti-Israel pro-Palestinian rhetoric plays big with a Europe that has long sided with Palestine emotionally.
We could have an interesting discussion here, for sure.
If the Democrats were to nominate “a President like her father” Caroline Kennedy wouldn’t vote for him. She, and much of the modern Democratic Party, are much further to the left of where John Kennedy was politically.
She’s asking us to vote for a president like the image the Kennedy family maintains of John and Bobby Kennedy. That’s a different matter entirely.
I’d add the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty to Liberal’s excellent recitation of JFK’s accomplishments. People forget that atmospheric testing was common in the early 1960s. We have much less radiation in our atmosphere today because of JFK’s initiative. He inspired a generation of young Americans to public service, Bill Clinton being only one of the most prominent. He also, much to his credit, rehabilitated Oppenheimer and several others marginalized during the McCarthy Era. He handled the Cuban Missile Crisis masterfully; most of those advising him would have, one way or another, with the best of intentions, have led us into WWIII.
He wasn’t just “all talk,” as some have said - but words have tremendous power for the right kind of leader, anyway. Read or see Kennedy’s speech to the Houston ministers, his Inaugural Address, his American University speech, or his speech at the time he submitted the Civil Rights Act to Congress… all masterpieces, and all hugely influential. That’s what a President needs to be able to say to persuade others, in a modern democracy, to follow him. Obama has it; I think less and less that Hillary Clinton does.
I admire JFK for his courage, intelligence, vigor, vision and wit while recognizing his many faults (his serial womanizing, which was cruel to his wife and opened him up to blackmail, and his lies and omissions about his fragile health, which withheld information that the voters really should have known). But he was, by virtually any measure, one of our greatest post-World War II presidents, and I would personally go so far as to put him among the ten-best ever.
I’m glad that Caroline and her uncle have endorsed Obama. Caroline is, by all accounts, a straight shooter, and I agree with Phlosphr that her op-ed was from the heart.
BTW, am I the only one who thinks Caroline Kennedy saying Obama would be a president like her father is just a little bit [gulp] inauspicious? (Bang! Bang!)
The Bush tax cuts have actually helped middle income families immensely and stimulated the economy. While the tax cuts that happened during Kennedy’s administration (and to a much larger degree during Reagan’s) were entirely necessary, I do not think they have had as much economic impact because studies have historically shown very few people were actually paying the top marginal rates when they went as high as 90%–tax revenues have tended to increase from the top bracket as the rate has gone down (I’d say the equilibrium for this is down near 45% or so–at a 90% rate you’re going to have people intentionally keeping their “income” low.)
This is just simply completely, absolute horse shit. Eisenhower agreed to the idea of developing a plan to stage such an invasion, agreed to training Cuban exiles to fight as guerrillas in Cuba in an attempt to overthrow Castro.
The Kennedy administration changed key strategic/tactical aspects of the plan and history can clearly link these changes directly to some of the primary reasons the invasion failed.
Now, we have no idea if, the original plan developed under Eisenhower would have worked–but it was never implemented. The Kennedy plan had fundamental differences strategically and tactically. Furthermore, a great President once said “the Buck Stops Here” Kennedy was the man who gave the order to carry the invasion out, period. He was President, he was responsible. Was Kennedy responsible for the strategic and tactical blunders that developed in the plan? No, these changes were made by men lower on the totem pole, and Kennedy, being no trained military tactician would not be especially equipped to understand these changes were negative. But the facts remain the plan of invasion that Kennedy executed was not the same one that was developed by the Eisenhower Administration (note Eisenhower had no direct involvement in the strategic/tactical plans for the invasion either, despite his significant military experience.)
Theodore Roosevelt was the youngest President.
$20 billion dollars spent in Latin America, result: a wave of new dictatorships in Latin America. Are they necessarily linked? I’m not sure, but we definitely saw a wave of authoritarian governments being implemented in the wake of this $20 billion money sink.
Last I checked Johnson and Nixon took us to the moon. As is typical, Johnson walked the walk while Kennedy talked the talk.
“On his behalf” more like “carried out because Kennedy could not.” Kennedy never would have gotten half as much done as Johnson did. Furthermore Johnson served something like six years as President, he had many policies of his own and to say his entire administration was just a long period of implementing Kennedy’s plans would be foolish.
Yeah, keep in mind Kennedy had the support of pro-segregation Senators when he was in the Senate and threw blacks under the bus on the whole Civil Rights Act of 1957.
I think Kennedy was a great man, but he wasn’t a saint. His support for civil rights didn’t seem to manifest until it was obvious the country as a whole was getting ready for change.
Certainly LBJ, with his long experience as Speaker of the House, was better at working with Congress than JFK was. OTOH, that does not mean JFK was doomed to be ineffectual in that regard. I think LBJ’s landslide trouncing of AuH2O in 1964 is a good indication of which way the country was trending; JFK would have had a much more cooperative and more solidly liberal-Dem Congress in his second term.
The relevant question is not where Kennedy lay on the spectrum in his time, but where he would in our time. What kind of President would Kennedy have been in our modern era? After the feminist movement, after the birth of environmentalism, after the birth of the struggle for gay rights, after the lessons of Vietnam, after the civil rights movement, and after everything that has happened in the intervening 45 years, JFK would have been a President like Obama. Agree or not, that’s what Caroline is saying. That’s what Ted Kennedy is saying. They’re not saying Obama’s policies are those of JFK, but rather that his character and principles, his potential for change for the good, are the same.
Okay, then, for all of that I disagree.
This isn’t all about personality, you know. It is about what direction the country will be steered in. And the fact remains that Kennedy in his day not only was a moderate, he was pretty contemptuous of liberals in the Democratic Party like Stevenson and Humphrey.
You won’t hear much of this in Caroline Kennedy’s op-eds, but it is true.
And Ronald Reagan being another. Surprise! 
Everything we saw [John Kennedy] do seemed to betray a huge enjoyment of life; he seemed to grasp from the beginning that life is one fast moving train, and you have to jump aboard and hold on to your hat and relish the sweep of the wind as it rushes by. You have to enjoy the journey, it’s unfaithful not to. I think that’s how his country remembers him, in his joy. And it was a joy he knew how to communicate. He knew that life is rich with possibilities, and he believed in opportunity, growth and action.
And when he died, when that comet disappeared over the continent, a whole nation grieved and would not forget. A tailor in New York put up a sign on the door - “Closed because of a death in the family.” That sadness was not confined to us. “They cried the rain down that night,” said a journalist in Europe. They put his picture up in huts in Brazil and tents in the Congo, in offices in Dublin and Warsaw. That was some of what he did for his country, for when they honored him they were honoring someone essentially, quintessentially, completely American. When they honored John Kennedy, they honored the nation whose virtues, genius - and contradictions - he so fully reflected.
Many men are great, but few capture the imagination and the spirit of the times. The ones who do are unforgettable. Four administrations have passed since John Kennedy’s death, five presidents have occupied the Oval Office, and I feel sure that each of them thought of John Kennedy now and then, and his thousand days in the White House.
Ronald Reagan, June 24, 1985