Empty suit Obama couldn't lite President's Kennedy's cigars.To even think of comparing the two makes me want to throw up.Obama is a total disaster as people will see after it's too late.

So I guess I understand the comparison.

Talk to them instead. That was JFK's biggest mistake. And his biggest triumph was talking to Kruschev. So... Go Barack!

P.S. People who rite, "lite cigars," should just crawl back to Dallas and stay there. Tastes Grate! Less philling!

David,

Wonderful article and insights.

We miss you -- desperately -- around here.

You sure you don't want to be editor again? Salon could really use you.

While you were writing this terrific piece, Joan is no doubt busy scribbling her latest blog post condemning the people of Kentucky who didn't vote for Hillary as elitist sexists.

The only non-parallel is that the fear of Kennedy's Catholicism is dwarfed by the fear of Obama's mixed race.

However, if he can get enough new and younger voters registered in every state, maybe he'll have the votes to counteract that. I surely hope so.

Isn't it a shame that fear and misinformation completely fogs the message of your piece which I think captures Obama's worldview and appeal perfectly.

...from 1963, when Barry Goldwater, who had first inspired a lot of people only to end up horrifying them, and John Kennedy was just hitting his stride as an electrifying world leader -- one whose words and their delivery were every bit as important to his success as his political moves (and maybe even moreso), to 2008, and the possible successor to the JFK mantle, sparring with a man who is still stuck in 1964 with the then-still-evolving Goldwater. David Talbot, with powerful and carefully-chosen words you have, in the last sentence of your article, driven home the message as clearly as it can ever be. Outstanding!

We stand on the threshold of a truly new age of Americanism (as opposed to simple nationalism), prepared to launch, under the leadership of a man much like John Kennedy in spirit if not background, and our choice is either to pick up where we essentially left off in 1963, or to just return to 1964.

In reading this article I was forced to relive the day John Kennedy was taken from us. I was in journalism class and we were discussing the role of the media in knocking Nixon out of contention by the way he was made to show up during the televised debates with Kennedy in 1960. One of my fellow students commented that Kennedy may well have carried the day regardless of the obvious manipulation of Nixon's image during those debates, on the power of his words and his delivery of those words, that regardless of how he appeared, Nixon was already at a tremendous disadvantage. A number of us nodded in assent.

Moments later we were told over the PA system that the President and Governor John Connaly had been fired on in Dallas and there was concern that the President may have been hit. As we all sat, stunned that such a barbaric act could even happen in 20th century America in the 1960s, a class member who had been absent that day walked into the room, her face stained with tears, and stood before the class. Our teacher didn't even speak as this young woman stood before the class and said "The President of the United States is dead."

Our discussion had become utterly moot, and our lives had stopped on a dime. The memory of the girl who'd chosen to cut class on that fateful day only to walk in and deliver the news that our hopes for the future had been annihilated in an unforgiving moment, by a person or persons still unknown for certain, has remained a "just yesterday" thing for me for 45 years.

Now comes Barack Obama, the utterly logical extension of that frozen moment, to pick up the pieces of an idea -- change of the political paradigm -- and all he has to overcome is a man who defines himself by the memory of another man who was, at the time, locked even farther in the past then than 1964.

To be fair, Barry Goldwater did, indeed, evolve. So, it seemed eight years ago, had John McCain. Clearly, though, in the end we are left with exactly what David Talbot describes: that political contest which never happened.

There can only be one outcome to this one. There is no place anymore in leadership of the United States of America for a warrior. His time is long past. It is finished. The circle is at last about to be closed after 45 long and painful years.

Thank you David Talbot, thank you Barack Obama, and thank you, John McCain, for accepting the sackcloth-and-ashes position which someone would have had to fill. Your moment has come and is gone. Barry Goldwater would be shaking his fist at you today, sir.

Get ready for the shift.

Good old Smilin' Jack, he of the exploding cigars. It didn't work out too well for him, did it?

And we'll see if Senator Obama has that nasty little authoritarian streak that Smilin' Jack and Bobby had. Don't expect any repeal of any aspects of the Patriot Act real soon. All I can say to you Americans is "Good luck!"

Obama has carefully cultivated his faux Kennedy persona over much of his adult life, building upon his imaginative dreams of a connection between his father and JFK, which he retold so often that even some members of the Kennedy family thought it true.

Obama was aided by great speech writers including Ted Sorensen, responsible for many of the memorable JFK quotes, a media too-easily impressed by and unquestioning of "his compelling life story", and the backing of the Chicago political machine.

I would for Obama over McCain, but would vote for Clinton over McCain, too.

What about all that (non-existent) missile-gap talk? And what imminent threat prompted him to send "advisors" to Vietnam?

I'm not anti-JFK, but let's cool it with the hagiography, 'kay?