Sorry that I found this a bit late, but I think it's a necessary point: stop comparing Barack Obama to JFK, blogs George Packer. I agree - it's an association no candidate should want to be guilty of cultivating.
Packer explains:
JFK. was a mediocre President. For two and a half years his position on civil rights was legalistic - he stood up for enforcing court orders - until the dramatic images from Birmingham in May 1963 forced him to describe the issue as a moral one. The civil-rights bill he then introduced into Congress stood little chance of passing partly because Kennedy was unwilling to spend the huge amount of necessary political capital. For those who believe he was on his way out of Vietnam when he was assassinated, how to explain the dramatic coup three weeks before his death that overthrew the government of Ngo Dinh Diem and pulled the US ever deeper into the quagmire? Kennedy's main domestic accomplishment was a tax cut; his main foreign accomplishment was avoiding nuclear war over Soviet missiles in Cuba (his finest hour).
There's a lot of talk about Obama as a possible transformative president, let's hope the neo-Camelot crap doesn't go to his head.
