Obama's speechwriter? Ask Not!Why Obama is No JFK
By Ted Widmer
John F. Kennedy is not running for anything in 2008, but you’d never know it. A front-page photo in the New York Times recently showed his electability in Serbia, of all places, where local candidates are vying to establish their credentials as the latest citizens of the New Frontier. Back in the U.S., no candidate has captured the reflected glory of JFK more than Barack Obama, thanks to his youth, eloquence, and message of change. The Kennedy-Obama parallel has been played up by the press, and Obama’s campaign has not discouraged those comparisons—indeed, it has brought in Ted Sorensen, JFK’s talented speechwriter, to make speeches and render the judgment of history.
But the comparison falls short when voters consider the key question for 2008: foreign policy experience. It’s true that Obama, like Kennedy, is a youngish senator (at 46, three years older than Kennedy when he ran for president), but the parallel falters after that. The more one looks into Kennedy’s lifelong preparation for the job, the more one realizes how misleading it was, then and now, to describe him as inexperienced. Everyone who has stressed Kennedy’s youth, from Dan Quayle in 1988 to Obama today, has bumped up against the uncomfortable fact that JFK was an extremely well-informed statesman in 1960. As Lloyd Bentsen reminded us in the zinger that pole-axed Quayle, the truth was a lot more complicated than the myth.
Kennedy, of course, was a decorated veteran of World War Two, which he fought in the South Pacific. But before and after the conflict, he had acquired travel experiences that most people take a lifetime to accumulate, richly detailed in biographies like Robert Dallek’s An Unfinished Life. His father was ambassador to the United Kingdom in the pivotal year 1938, and young Kennedy was in the audience of the House of Commons as the Munich deal was furiously debated (the experience shaped his first book, Why England Slept). As a young man, he made American officials uneasy with his relentless desire to see parts of Europe and the world that few Americans ever encountered. In 1939 alone, he took in the Soviet Union, Romania, Turkey, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Greece, France, Germany, Italy and Czechoslovakia. As the war was ending, he attended the San Francisco conference that created the United Nations, filing seventeen dispatches for the Chicago Herald American.
He maintained this lively interest in world affairs as a young Congressman.
..Of course, travel does not instantly translate into electability—if it did, Geraldo Rivera might be president. But it’s an important consideration, especially for a candidate like Obama, who is running against an array of Democratic contenders (Biden, Dodd, Clinton, Richardson) who have far more first-hand experience dealing with issues of foreign policy and national security. And compared to Kennedy, Obama’s record of world travel is quite thin.
Like Kennedy, Obama did spend some time in his youth living in a foreign country. And because that country, Indonesia, is both Asian and majority Muslim, Obama can—and does—claim to have a unique perspective on a region and a religion that increasingly command Washington’s attention. But it’s worth noting the considerable differences between Obama’s and Kennedy’s overseas experiences. Kennedy lived in Europe, then the geo-strategic center of the world, as a footloose young man who had front-row seats at momentous diplomatic dramas, thanks to his ambassador father. Obama lived as a boy in Indonesia—a big, fascinating country, but not central to U.S. global strategy. If that childhood experience had a genuine impact beyond teaching him the obvious truth that the world is diverse, then he needs to make it clearer how he will translate that knowledge into sound policy.
The senator apparently never been to Western Europe since launching his political career. What renders this gap especially surprising is that Obama is Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Europe. Not only has the Senator not visited the region his committee oversees, but as Steve Clemons of the Washington Note has observed, Obama’s committee has not held a single policy-oriented hearing since he’s been chairman. Europe may not be the central playing field it was in Kennedy’s day, but it remains essential to the global set of alliances and relationships that the U.S. needs to cultivate in the new century. In fact, there is no place where it will be more urgent to rebuild bridges. As Obama knows, the United States cannot do it alone—and Europe will need to play a supporting role in whatever strategy the next president articulates.
---------------------------------------------------------------Ted Widmer, Director of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, is a Senior Research Fellow at the New America America Foundation
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