The Obvious Comparison Dems Refuse to Make

 

HINT: It’s more than flashy hair.

President John F. Kennedy now resides in a curious limbo. He was briefly the face of the Democrat Party as it wanted to see itself in the post-WWII era. In hindsight he was an anomaly in the party’s history. Before JFK, the most prominent Democrat Presidential contenders teetered between the crude (Andrew Jackson, William Jennings Bryan, Harry Truman, Al Smith) and the unashamedly elite (Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, Rutherford B. Hayes, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Adlai Stevenson). JFK was an interesting hybrid of both. Like Al Smith, he was a Roman Catholic, like FDR a graduate of Harvard College. His lineage also had its disreputable side, with a family fortune reputedly acquired by bootlegging during the Great Depression. Backed by that fortune, he became famous and successful at an early age but was criticized as callow and rumored to be a philanderer in his first years in the Senate. When he became a presidential candidate, he was a clear break from the past. The Dems had twice lost to Eisenhower with the same candidate, an “egghead” named Adlai Stevenson who came across as a cold fish on the campaign trail. Kennedy on the other hand won the Presidency on the strength of his performance in the first televised debate, where he outshone the sitting Vice President Richard Nixon, a comparative commoner from Whittier, California.

Any of this sound familiar? His unexpected victory over the obvious heir of a popular two-term President made the Democrats look like a breath of fresh air in a sequence of Presidents who had upheld the prime plank of the party since its inception: “Separate but (sort of) Equal” in matters of race. Wilson had removed Jews and blacks from Princeton before pursuing similar policies as President while instituting the first ever national income tax. FDR never integrated units within the military during WWII and interned Japanese citizens for the duration while growing the size of the federal government by leaps and bounds. Truman ignored rising racial tensions and got us into a war he didn’t know how to get out of. It took President Eisenhower to integrate southern schools with the aid of the military, and it was Eisenhower who ended the costly Korean War we’d been fighting under the flag of Truman’s United Nations. It was also Eisenhower who presided over an extended period of peacetime prosperity and stern but quiet vigilance against a menacing Soviet Union.

Kennedy had a window of great opportunity to remake the party as something other than its legacy of the Confederacy, Jim Crow, foreign wars, and aggressively graduated tax rates. He sensed that Americans had grown bored in the Eisenhower years. He wanted to Make America Young Again. He challenged the world’s greatest technological power to go to the moon in 10 years. He used his bully pulpit to encourage young people to become physically fit again and join a new ‘Peace Corps’ to provide service to the needy in the world’s poorest regions. He pioneered the heretical idea of dramatically reducing tax rates to fuel more vigorous economic growth. He was a brand new game in town. He was loved and hated in equal degrees. 

John F. Kennedy was the Trump of his day. Or, with equal justice, you could say that Trump is the JFK of his day. Who remembers now that the American conservative establishment attacked Trump viciously in 2016 as a classical liberal in conservative clothing? Just as Kennedy was assaulted by liberals for his ultimately successful and immensely popular tax reductions. 

Differences between them. Sure. Kennedy was reputedly a war hero; Trump wasn’t. Kennedy was young, just 42 when elected: Trump was 70. Kennedy was a drug addict; Trump is a teatotaller. Kennedy was never impeached; Trump was impeached twice. Following Eisenhower, JFK inherited relatively few imminent crises: Following Obama and then Biden, Trump inherited a ton of urgent crises at home and abroad.

Still, there’s truth in the saying that exceptions prove the rule. Both men had gorgeous First Ladies known for their style and individuality, good and bad. Both men made specific overtures across the racial divide between black and white to improve the fairness and safety of the nation as a whole. Both had mini-scandals about hiring relatives in their administrations (AG Bobby Kennedy, State Dept Negotiator Jared Kushner). Both had personal reputations stained by rumors of affairs and dalliances while married. Both had serious controversies surrounding their elections. Both developed fierce enmities in the CIA and FBI, which cost them dearly (Trump his 2020 re-election, JFK his life.)

Why does any of this matter? Because the Democrats in particular are in a state of denial about both men that represents a clear and present danger to the nation. To this day, JFK remains a Democrat icon, an eternal celebrity like a Hollywood star, more famous for his face than for his record as President. That’s all they can afford to remember of him, because if they looked more closely at his Presidency, they would find that most of the sins they have attacked Trump for are equally a part of JFK’s Thousand Days before he was assassinated at tremendous cost to the mental health of the United States. 

Trump is not being attacked and targeted for assassin’s bullets because of his mean tweets. He’s regarded as an authoritarian devil because his presidencies have been bold, innovative, and threatening to establishment fuddy-duddies. Just like JFK’s tax cuts, Civil Rights initiatives, Peace Corps, moon mission, and direct confrontations with nuclear enemies squatting within our own hemisphere and in trouble spots around the world. He pissed off too many people inside a secret government that considered Presidents expendable if they got in the way. Why, in the wake of the assassination and the clumsy murder of Oswald in police custody, the American people knew something was wrong with the official narrative and have never changed their minds in the corrosive decades of coverup that have buried the truth for more than 60 years now. JFK’s Thousand Days are the only glimpse we’ve ever had of an enlightened Democrat Party millions continue to believe somehow exists underneath the corruption, vindictiveness, and treacheries of all the Dems after Dallas.

And that’s only half the denial on the Democrat side. The other half is that the JFK Democrat Party is still the one well educated liberals (and many silent Dems and Independents) want the party to be. But the current motley gang of haters and dividers and niche victim groups have absolutely nothing in common with that party, the one that died on a gurney in Dallas on November 22, 1963. A day I remember well. The denial is so complete that self-styled Progressives are actively hoping and working for another nation-devastating assassination, unaware that if they succeed, they will have murdered the iconic JFK for a second and probably final time.

You think Satan is cool as long he’s twerking to your lyrics. Hear what he would tell you if he were in mind to speak some truth…