WASHINGTON POST COLUMN: …There is a coyness to some retrospectives. In a long essay in a recent New York Times Book Review, Executive Editor Jill Abramson wonders “Was Kennedy a great president?” — a question she never answers — and opines that he “remains all but impossible to pin down,” whatever that means. The question is actually easy to answer. He was not a great president. He was somewhere between middling and mediocre.
At his death, he had no major legislative accomplishments. His two major proposals — a tax cut to spur the economy and civil rights legislation — languished in Congress. He expanded the Vietnam War, and though some supporters argue he would have reversed that in a second term, presidents are judged on what they did, not what they might have done. His economic policies, symbolized by the proposed tax cut and called the “new economics” (an American Keynesianism), had damaging long-term consequences. They unleashed inflation in the late 1960s and 1970s; and they effectively abolished the commitment to balanced budgets — a loss that still haunts us.
Beyond Vietnam, his foreign-policy track record was lackluster. The Bay of Pigs was a disaster. At a 1961 summit in Vienna with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Kennedy was — by his own admission — cowed. Later, the Berlin Wall went up. He did defuse the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, but the crisis may have resulted partly from Khrushchev’s sense that Kennedy could be intimidated… (more)
EDITOR: President Barack Obama is the real thing that we fantasized Jack Kennedy would have been. We mourned JFK, but we agree with the above assessment. Unlike JFK, Obama did not have a daddy to pave and pay the way to his presidency.
So just who did pave and pay the way for this guy to get to where he is??????
EDITOR: That’s the point. He won it on his own merit… or the perception of merit.