Did You Know Frank Rich Was Still Writing?

Can we give Texas back to Mexico?

Frank Rich is still writing.  He's at New York magazine, along with Jon Chait, apparently in an effort to turn that mag into something worth reading.

He wrote a piece recently about the JFK assassination.  Obviously, we are two years from the 50th anniversary of that event and Stephen King has written one of his massive books about it.  In this case, it's about a Maine schoolteacher (natch) who travels back in time to prevent the assassination and about the toxic atmosphere in Dallas that undoubtedly contributed to Oswald's decision to write his name into history with blood.

Rich's angle is to compare the vitriol of 1963 with the vitriol of 2011; to compare the glamorous Kennedy to the glamorous Obama.

The funny thing is how neatly this matches up with Chait's piece about how liberals can't stand their presidents when they are in office.

JFK was not a great president when we examine his record fairly.  The Cuban Missile Crisis is probably his finest moment and that was really a series of blunders in Havana, Washington and Moscow that was only prevented because no one was really that in to ending the world.  In other words, Kennedy's finest moment was in not bringing about a nuclear apocalypse.  I should note that this distinction applies to every post-1945 president, too.

Kennedy was able to accomplish almost nothing in Congress.  It wasn't until his death that Lyndon Johnson was able to use national grief and his legendary "Johnson Treatment" to strong arm legislation through the recalcitrant Southern Democrats who de facto controlled the Senate.  So while JFK set the agenda, LBJ delivered the goods.  It was Johnson who passed civil and voting rights, passed the tax cuts, passed the Great Society - not Kennedy.

And Rich, as a boomer, admits to being blinded by the Kennedy mystique, the glamor - he even calls it erotic. It is precisely this mystique, this fascination with the appearance of things, that taints our political attitudes.

By any reasonable historical standard, Obama has been one of our most successful legislative Presidents.  He doesn't rank with Wilson, FDR or Johnson, but rather he comes into the second tier with Reagan.  And presumably he's less than half way through his presidency.  If he gets a Democratic House and some basic reform of Senate rules, he could conceivably get some movement on deficit reduction and some sort of climate change legislation.

But while it is safe to lionize, even fetishize, the long dead Kennedy, Obama comes in for slings and arrows from Left and Right.  He gets heckled by OWS in a speech.  He gets yelled at by moronic South Carolina legislators.  He is called both a devout Muslim and a Communist in the same breath.  It reminds me of the Onion headline shortly after his election "Black Man Given America's Worst Job."

The good news is that 15 year from now, when liberals are kvetching about what a terrible disappointment Elizabeth Warren is as President, they will all say how much better Obama was.