He was arguably the first media-created pol, and his public image was created whole cloth by image consultants, media folk, and ad agencies. His record in the Senate and House was that of a traditional do-nothing back-bencher, and “Profiles in Courage” was almost exclusively authored by his speechwriter. The Presidential campaign was, similarly, a bunch of Obama-like nonsense full of aspirational rhetoric and little in terms of concrete data.

IMO, JFK was one of the worst Presidents of the Cold War period, and is directly comparable to Obama on most issues. Daddy was a productive person, but JFK was not much more than the culmination of his father’s hard work. I have no idea why so many conservatives like to hold JFK up as an example of a “good” Democrat: his Presidency and its goals were almost all failures along the lines of the Obama administration, and the fool almost got us into a nuclear war with the Soviets.

RFK and Teddy were, for all their flaws (and for all that I disagree with their politics), productive human beings who have some level of accomplishment. JFK never really cared about policy and never did much as President beyond screwing Marilyn Manson and signing some bills that he had little to do with.

JFK wasn’t enormously interested in politics and only entered because his older brother, Joe Jr, died in WWII. The MA district he ran in was heavily Democratic, and he ran unopposed in the primary as a result of his dad’s string-pulling. I will agree that Kennedy’s Senatorial race was more hard-fought than Obama’s, but we’re still talking about a race where Kennedy vastly outspent his opponent, where his opponent blew off the race, and where Kennedy played up his Catholicism in a state where Irish Catholics outnumbered Protestants, and where Irish Catholics had the better (and more corrupt) political institutions. I would take JFK over Obama as well, but I would take almost any of the modern Presidents over Obama (excluding perhaps LBJ).

Obama’s political story is much more akin to Kennedy’s than anyone else: as with Kennedy’s image as a vibrant, healthy “best of the best” junior officer in WWII, Obama’s “cool” image is almost entirely fabricated. Both had their intelligence and oratory over-exaggerated by a compliant press, and both relied to a fault on political institutions and donors who they had no control or sway over. The Presidency for both was by and large run by Congress and the Cabinet, and the high-profile policy that they had a direct hand in creating (in Kennedy’s case, a superstar tour across Europe and an ill-fated meeting with Khrushchev; in Obama’s case, a similar attempt at star-power diplomacy tours) were absolute failures. Both were bad at recognizing mistakes by their predecessors, and in many cases both have doubled down on or didn’t understand bad policy (Bay of Pigs for Kennedy, lots of things for Obama). Neither one was particularly good at admitting mistakes or acknowledging when they were out of their depth. Both were very unpopular as their tenures came to a close — JFK’s reputation was rehabilitated by assassination, and with God’s grace nothing nearly as horrific will happen to Obama.

Lots of conservatives like comparing Obama to Carter, but for all the bad things said about Carter, he was a self-made man, very intelligent and understanding of technical details, and a true political reformer. He also had executive experience, made some very gutsy and admirable calls as governor and President, and was willing and able to pass through some very significant deregulation efforts. Carter’s problem was in some ways the opposite of Kennedy/Obama: he took to much of an interest in the day-to-day of various small departments, and micromanaged too much. Carter also assumed that “stagflation” was inevitable (rather than the result of policy), and undertook many wrong-headed steps in “managing the decline”. (In contrast, Obama and Kennedy were both idealists who saw the world as something that molds to their desires.)

I think we’d see some very similar (if moderated) tendencies in a Zombie JFK presidency as we’re seeing with Obama, and IMO JFK is far over-idealized as a “hawk” (he was, but in a stupid and foppish way as compared to Eisenhower) and as a classically liberal politician (his tax cuts were something he was not greatly involved in, and at any rate were based on Keynesian reasoning). IMO, Bill Clinton and Carter are easily politicians more worthy of plaudits than someone like JFK and his absolutely abominable VP.

though I will offer a rebuttal for why those were not traits which, in retrospect, were that fundamental to JFK’s presidency:

1) True, but this was largely based on Keynesian considerations and included several deductions which are more accurately classed as welfare (to be fair, this is also broadly true of the Bush tax cuts as well). Kennedy’s first attempt at passing them included much more of a welfarist component, before his friends in Congress modified the proposal.

2) While JFK was a “hawk”, so was everyone else. The primary difference between JFK and Eisenhower was that JFK was an internationalist who saw multilateral institutions as hugely important, and US sovereignty within those institutions as less important (founded the Peace Core, put lots of emphasis on the UN, pushed for unsuccessful multilateral mutual defense treaties in the ME, the Pacific, and Africa). He also put lots of effort into high-profile “star power” diplomacy, and was idealistic and radical about transformative agendas abroad. Recall that he was criticized (somewhat unfairly) by many Republicans as someone willing to trade our sovereignty away to the Soviets, and as someone who was too easily snookered by “moderate” socialists. LBJ was also a “hawk” in the JFK mold (minus the fact that he couldn’t sell “charisma” worth a hill of beans), and his presidency revealed the weakness of this style of “hawkishness”.

I would also note that today’s Dems don’t suffer from a lack of hawkishness — they are plenty willing to commit US troops and funds to conflicts where there is no US interest, like Bosnia or Libya. Legitimately anti-war Dems largely became a minority fixture after the Vietnam War, as one can see by how many Dems voted for and (despite their protestations) supported Bush-era foreign policy.