スーパー・チューズデイまたは
　メガ・チューズデイとか大変な騒ぎです。

乗り遅れないよう
　久々にＮＹＴを覗いたら
　次のコラムが目に付きました。

タイトルは明らかに
　故ケネディ大統領の有名な就任演説の
　もじりでしょうね。

｢JFKがオバマのために何をすることができるかを
　問うなかれ。｣

こういったところでしょうか。

結構知らない単語もあり
読むのに次官、じゃない時間がかかりました。
　すらすら読めなくちゃ、いかんばいね
　　英語も、まだまだ未熟です…　(＾＾；)

****さわりを…　　***
Ask Not What J.F.K. Can Do for Obama
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/opinion/03rich.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin


By FRANK RICH
Published: February 3, 2008

BEFORE John F. Kennedy was a president, a legend,
a myth and a poltergeist stalking America’s
2008 campaign, he was an upstart contender seen
as a risky bet for the Democratic nomination in 1960.

Kennedy was judged “an ambitious but superficial playboy”
by his liberal peers, according to his biographer
Robert Dallek.

“He never said a word of importance in the Senate,
and he never did a thing,” in the authoritative
estimation of the Senate’s master,Lyndon Johnson.

Adlai Stevenson didn’t much like Kennedy, and
neither did Harry Truman, who instead supported Senator
Stuart Symington of Missouri.

J. F. K. had few policy prescriptions beyond Democratic
boilerplate
(a higher minimum wage,“comprehensive housing legislation”).

As his speechwriter Richard Goodwin
recalled in his riveting 1988 memoir “Remembering America,”
Kennedy’s main task was to prove his political viability.

He had to persuade his party that he was not
a wealthy dilettante and not
“too young, too inexperienced and, above all, too Catholic”
to be president.

How did the fairy-tale prince from Camelot vanquish a field of
heavyweights led by the longtime liberal warrior
Hubert Humphrey?

It wasn’t ideas.
It certainly wasn’t experience.
It wasn’t even the charisma that Kennedy would show off
in that fall’s televised duels with Richard Nixon.

Looking back almost 30 years later,
Mr. Goodwin summed it up this way:
“He had to touch the secret fears and ambivalent
longings of the American heart, divine and speak to
the desires of a swiftly changing nation ?
his message grounded on his own intuition of some vague
and spreading desire for national renewal.”

In other words, Kennedy needed two things.
He needed poetry, and he needed a country with some desire,
however vague, for change.

Mr. Goodwin and his fellow speechwriter Ted Sorensen helped
with the poetry.
Still, the placid America of 1960 was not obviously
in the market for change.
The outgoing president, Ike, was the most popular incumbent
since F. D.R.

The suburban boom was as glossy
as it is now depicted in the television show “Mad Men.”
The Red Panic of the McCarthy years was
in temporary remission.

But Kennedy’s intuition was right.
America’s boundless self-confidence was being rattled
by (as yet) low-grade fevers: the surprise Soviet technological
triumph of Sputnik; anti-American riots in even friendly
non-Communist countries;
　the arrest　of Martin Luther King Jr. at an
　all-white restaurant in Atlanta;
the inexorable national shift from
manufacturing to white-collar jobs.

Kennedy bet his campaign on, as he put it,
“the single assumption that the American people are uneasy
at the present drift in our national course” and “that they
have the will and strength to start
the United States moving again.”

For all the Barack Obama-J. F. K.comparisons,
whether legitimate or over-the-top, what has
often been forgotten is that Mr. Obama’s
weaknesses resemble Kennedy’s at least
as much as his strengths.

But to compensate for those shortcomings,
he gets an extra benefit that J. F. K. lacked in 1960.

There’s nothing vague about the public’s desire
for national renewal in 2008, with a reviled incumbent
in the White House and only 19 percent of the population
finding the country on the right track, according to the last
Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll.

America is screaming for change.

Either of the two Democratic
contenders will swing the pendulum.(振り子)

Their marginal policy differences
notwithstanding, they are both orthodox liberals.

As the party’s voters in 22 states step forward on Tuesday,
the overriding question they face, as defined by both
contenders, is this:
Which brand of change is more likely,
in Kennedy’s phrase,
to get America moving again?

Lost in the hoopla(大騒ぎ) over the Teddy
and Caroline Kennedy show last week
was the parallel endorsement of Hillary Clinton
by three of Robert Kennedy’s children.
《後略》



//////
今日は、久々に旧ギンコー時代の方と会食。

もうちゃ箱主人