Kennedy Adviser Discusses History in Backing Obama
Ted Sorensen, former aide to President John F. Kennedy, challenged claims that Barack Obama lacks the experience to be president.
(By Charles Rex Arbogast -- Associated Press)
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CLAIMING THE JFK MANTLE
Kennedy Adviser Discusses History in Backing Obama
The comparison has been floating around for a while, so it was only a matter of time before Barack Obama's campaign started making the claim explicitly itself: Meet BHO, the new JFK.
The Obama campaign is seizing on the comparison itself to rebut one of the main arguments against his candidacy -- that he lacks experience. At stops this week in Chicago and Iowa, Obama was introduced by Ted Sorensen, the 79-year-old former Kennedy speechwriter, who went to great lengths to knock down the inexperience charge by invoking his former boss.
In a packed hotel ballroom in Coralville, outside Iowa City, Sorensen spent several minutes on the podium retelling Kennedy's handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, "the most dangerous crisis in the history of mankind."
"That young president who had been accused of being too inexperienced and too young successfully steered the country through that crisis," Sorensen said.
He compared Kennedy's secret negotiations with the Soviets to end the crisis to Obama's stated willingness -- criticized by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton -- to meet with the country's foes without preconditions in his first year in office. And he compared Kennedy's refusal to take the advice of his military advisers to invade Cuba to Obama's early opposition to the war in Iraq.
The crowd of more than 1,000 grew slightly restless by the end of Sorensen's history lesson, but Linda Yanney, a historian who heard it, said the JFK comparison was apt. Obama "has that sort of ease, and he looks great on a podium," said Yanney, who lives in Iowa City.
-- Alec MacGillis
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