With the dealth of Ted Kenneday, the talk in Massachusetts is of the Kennedy legacy and what it means. I think I have a different opinion--Barack Obama is not the next Kennedy. John F. Kennedy was only President for a short time. He made some mistakes, but he also said and did some very smart things that today's Democrat Party would be appalled at.
According to Jeff Jacoby in Sunday's Boston Globe:
"It is a paradoxical truth,'' he once told the Economic Club of New York, "that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now.'' What he had in mind, he said, was "an across-the-board, top-to-bottom cut in personal and corporate income taxes.''
Those were not the words of Senator Edward Kennedy. The speaker - in December 1962 - was President John F. Kennedy, and his ringing call for tax cuts was no anomaly."
Jeff Jacoby also reports:
"Senator Hubert Humphrey vowed that if anyone could find anything in the 1964 Civil Rights Bill that would compel hiring on the basis of race, "I will start eating the pages one after another.'' In a 1963 press conference, President Kennedy explicitly opposed racial preferences: "We are too mixed, this society of ours, to begin to divide ourselves on the basis of race or color.'"'
The article further points out:
"JFK likewise spoke for mainstream Democrats when he asserted that America would "pay any price, bear any burden'' to advance freedom and democracy in the world. He was a hawk who pressed for higher defense spending and American military superiority. The Democratic Party of more recent years - the party of "come home, America'' and the nuclear freeze - was one he wouldn't have recognized."
I used to be a Democrat. If the Democrat party still stood for the ideas expressed above--low taxes, color-blind civil rights, and the support of democracy around the world, I would still be one.
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