Alvin S. Felzenberg: Why America Continues to Prefer JFK
[Alvin S. Felzenberg is author of The Leaders We Deserve (and a Few We Didn’t): Rethinking the Presidential Rating Game. He is currently at work on a book about William F. Buckley, Jr.]
A conservative friend of mine asked me why the public continues to rank John F. Kennedy first among Barack Obama’s nine predecessors in public opinion surveys, as they did again just this week — a Gallup poll showed Kennedy with an 85 percent approval rating, eleven points higher than that of his closest competitor, Ronald Reagan.
At first blush, my friend’s bafflement seems justified. In office barely a thousand days, Kennedy was hardly the kind of president Barack Obama would term “transformative” — not like Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan, who each set the nation on a new course consistent with their vision.
Kennedy had few legislative achievements. Those enacted while he was in office — such as the Peace Corps, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and mental-health initiatives — however worthy, pale in comparison to the Marshall Plan, Social Security, the GI Bill, the Interstate Highway System, NASA, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, welfare reform, and the Strategic Defense Initiative. Kennedy deserves credit for being the first president to declare the equal enforcement of the law to all citizens as a “moral issue” — as “old as the Scriptures and as clear as the Constitution” — and, after nearly three years of delay, sending up to Congress what became the 1964 civil-rights bill, but it was Lyndon Johnson who steered it to passage....
Read entire article at National Review
A conservative friend of mine asked me why the public continues to rank John F. Kennedy first among Barack Obama’s nine predecessors in public opinion surveys, as they did again just this week — a Gallup poll showed Kennedy with an 85 percent approval rating, eleven points higher than that of his closest competitor, Ronald Reagan.
At first blush, my friend’s bafflement seems justified. In office barely a thousand days, Kennedy was hardly the kind of president Barack Obama would term “transformative” — not like Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan, who each set the nation on a new course consistent with their vision.
Kennedy had few legislative achievements. Those enacted while he was in office — such as the Peace Corps, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and mental-health initiatives — however worthy, pale in comparison to the Marshall Plan, Social Security, the GI Bill, the Interstate Highway System, NASA, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, welfare reform, and the Strategic Defense Initiative. Kennedy deserves credit for being the first president to declare the equal enforcement of the law to all citizens as a “moral issue” — as “old as the Scriptures and as clear as the Constitution” — and, after nearly three years of delay, sending up to Congress what became the 1964 civil-rights bill, but it was Lyndon Johnson who steered it to passage....