For those of you who were around in November of 1960 this campaign and election surely must sound familiar. The handsome, elequent John F. Kennedy with his cultured wife Jacquline and their children and their dog getting ready to move into the White House at the peak of their wave promising change for America.
It wasn just a couple days ago when I realized that Obama's electoral landslide wasn't just about politics and racial equality. Some one on the tube put it like this, "It's not an election it's a movement." And that's what I remember about Kennedy, too. Yes, the first Catholic president. Young too, yes. Children. Pets. Many firsts. But much of his appeal to my generation in those years was his fresh approach to what we at the time felt was a political system running amuck.
I was attending Cal Berkeley and while I saw Joan Baez and Mario Savio, a flaming liberal I was not. Married with our first child soon to be on the way Sally and I were more armchair than activist. The glow that we and others in that time and place felt though was the same purposeful involvement that Obama is calling for now. Over and over he has been saying in one way or another that our country's future is up to us, as individual, proactive citizens, not solely our elected officials.
Well, Kennedy said those same things too, and it became kind of a fairy tale in modern times. A Camelot in the making. It ended a short three years later in Dallas and business as usual returned to Washington with Lyndon Johnson in the White House. Somehow he didn't have the charisma or the innocence that Jack had despite the major improvements made in civil rights during his administration. Of course he had his Vietnam to endure too.
Like most I'm hoping it can last more than a few years this time. That we may really make those changes we all seem to feel are needed. Kennedy didn't have enough time but I'm hoping Obama will.
