February 26, 2008
Obama's foreign policy inexperience v. JFK's
Obama partisans love to compare their man to JFK, at least in terms of appeal and youth. Rowan Scarborough of the Washington Times quotes Obama advisor Lawrence Korb minimizing Obama's inexperience in foreign policy with a JFK comparison:
Lawrence Korb, a military analyst at the Center for American Progress and one of a dozen or so national security advisers to the Obama campaign, rebutted the lack-of-experience complaint, saying neither President Bush nor John F. Kennedy could claim an extensive national security background before entering the White House.
Really? This is illustrative of the extent to which Senator Obama's supporters will go to fudge the truth.
From Ask Not: Why Obama is no JFK, by Ted Widmer, in the Washington Monthly:
Kennedy, of course, was a decorated veteran of World War Two, which he fought in the South Pacific. But before and after the conflict, he had acquired travel experiences that most people take a lifetime to accumulate, richly detailed in biographies like Robert Dallek's An Unfinished Life. His father was ambassador to the United Kingdom in the pivotal year 1938, and young Kennedy was in the audience of the House of Commons as the Munich deal was furiously debated (the experience shaped his first book, Why England Slept). As a young man, he made American officials uneasy with his relentless desire to see parts of Europe and the world that few Americans ever encountered. In 1939 alone, he took in the Soviet Union, Romania, Turkey, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Greece, France, Germany, Italy and Czechoslovakia. As the war was ending, he attended the San Francisco conference that created the United Nations, filing seventeen dispatches for the Chicago Herald American.
There is much, much more in Widmer's article, about Kennedy's career as a congressman and senator and the foreign policy experience he garnered. Widmer convincingly demonstrates that Kennedy had studied, traveled, thought, and acted extensively on foreign affairs by the time he ran for president. Obama, not so much.
Obama partisans insult Kennedy's memory and the intelligence of the electorate when they make such fatuous glib comparisons.
Obama partisans insult Kennedy's memory and the intelligence of the electorate when they make such fatuous glib comparisons.