Ask Not What Your Country Can Do for You: From Kennedy to Obama

Since the 1961 JFK inaugural speech was delivered politicians and pundits have argued in favor of moving away from the Kennedy brand of liberalism. Yet today, some 46 years later, as these words and their speaker have long passed into legend, the urgency looms once again.

Regardless of our partisan attachments we all see how the latent effects of our growing economy and globalization continue to widen the gap between the poor and the more affluent. The worldwide environmental crisis persists. And most notably, the tremors created by our seemingly endless engagement in Iraq continue to intensify with each adding American death.

Though curiously, the civilian response to the Iraq conflict on the part of so many Americans has insofar been wavering or apathetic. Perhaps it is because to most of us the ravages of war are merely remote echoes that momentarily enter our lives via television screens as a kind of distraction from our daily, self-motivated routines. This lies in stark contrast to the collective of citizens unified under FDR, Eisenhower, and JFK, men and women who often called out to their hesitant fellows: "Don't you know there is a war on?"

Enter Barack Obama. With a clear understanding that each battle is above all a moral contest requiring unity, moral clarity and a precisely stated mission, on February 10, 2007 in Springfield, IL he revived the vision of JFK with a familiar, booming voice of change: "In the face of war, you believe there can be peace. In the face of despair, you believe there can be hope. In the face of a politics that's shut you out, that's told you to settle, that's divided us for too long, you believe we can be one people, reaching for what's possible, building that more perfect union."

With public statements like these, Senator Barack Obama has been pushing venue capacity regulations to their limit by attracting enormous crowds from all over the country. But it's not just liberals who sing his praises. David Brooks, a well respected conservative commentator and a New York Times columnist, who regularly appears on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer noted that "Barack Obama is the dream candidate. He's the only guy in the country among Democrats who really generates genuine enthusiasm." In his New York Times column Brooks also wrote that Barack Obama is "...that rarest of creatures: a megahyped phenomenon that lives up to the hype. It may not be personally convenient for him, but the times will never again so completely require the gifts that he possesses. Whether you're liberal or conservative, you should hope Barack Obama runs for president."

In his interview with Charlie Rose On February 12, just two days after Obama's presidential bid announcement, Jonathan Alter of Newsweek recounted his conversation with Ted Sorensen, a famous speech writer and a close adviser to JFK who for the first time in over 45 years has compared a presidential candidate to the likes of Kennedy. Ted Sorensen, referred to by Kennedy himself as his "intellectual blood bank", went on to say that JFK encountered similar challenges to those facing the young Senator from Illinois. Much like Obama, Kennedy ran as a political outsider - a young, overly ambitious, catholic congressman, who at the outset was largely written off as a nuisance by most of the establishment. However, as Sorensen puts it: "The only people that disagreed were the American voters."

It is fair to say that at this time both the supporters and opponents alike have come to view Barack Obama as a formidable contender. In addition to being refreshingly candid and well informed, Obama exhorts an enigmatic wave of inspiration that galvanizes vast and diverse crowds of Americans hungry for real change. "When he walks into a room, you know he's there" said Mark Shields, a syndicated columnist and a News Hour regular, explaining that the quality Obama posses is something of an "imponderable and intangible."

Perhaps these unsounded qualities that awaken something in each of us have been missing from the highest office for too long. And maybe for the first time since the Kennedy years the possibility of mending the bond to our government and each other is once again upon us.