Is Sarah Palin This Generation’s JFK? (Read before Scoffing)

from RedState:

Oh, I know, I know: This opens me up to the hackneyed Lloyd Bentsen trope about knowing John Kennedy, and you, Sarah Palin, are no John Kennedy… To which, one hopes, she would answer, “You’re right. I never cheated on my spouse, got involved with the Mob, and my Daddy never bought me a Pulitzer Prize.”

But, the analogy is this:

JFK created a whole new set or rules, a whole new road-map to the Presidential nomination of his party in 1960. And, we may be witnessing the same thing, fifty years later, from Sarah Palin.

John Kennedy went after the Vice Presidential nomination in 1956, in a failed attempt to be Adlai Stevenson’s running mate. It wasn’t so much that he was unsuccessful (the nomination went to Estes Kefauver instead), but what he learned along the way in setting himself up for his parties’ Presidential nomination in 1960.

What he learned was this: The grandees of the Democrat Party would not, under any circumstances, allow a Catholic on the national ticket. The Dixie-crats in particular where antipathetic. But, even the East Coast Elite found the young JFK too much to take: Elanor Roosevelt, in particular, found him loathsome (as, among other things, the second son of the then-reviled Joseph Kennedy), calling him “that little piss-ant”.

Believe me, pre-1964, you went absolutely nowhere in national Democrat politics without the blessing of Elanor Roosevelt. Think of her (before her death) as Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, Jesse Jackson, Barack Obama, Pinch Sulzberger and John Kerry all rolled into one big, fat ball of influence.

For the full analysis:

http://www.redstate.com/conservativecurmudgeon/2011/05/26/hmmm-tis-something-in-the-wind-that-makes-me-think-sarah-palin-might-be-this-generations-jfk/