JFK Disease

JFK Disease
It's more than "hoff" wacky.

Thursday, March 4, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST

John Kerry certainly looks like a president--the thick steel-wool
hair, the Lincolnian planes and shadows of his face. He is tall and
slim and seems serious. He also has the guts to wear salmon-colored
ties. A red tie is red and a blue tie is blue, and red and blue know
what color they are. Salmon is a more delicate hue. Salmon can't
decide what color it is. Sometimes it's pink and sometimes it's
orange. It's like wearing ambivalence on your shirt. This is an
unusual thing for a politician to do if it's thought through, and it
takes courage.

Mr. Kerry seems to me not a man of deep belief but of a certain amount
of sentiment and calculation. One has the sense he is a liberal
Democrat because of the time and place in which he was born, that he
inhaled a worldview as opposed to struggling through to one.

I have been wondering how much of Mr. Kerry's career is an essentially
unreflective meditation upon the life of John F. Kennedy. Or to put it
more directly, how much of his professional life has been a case of
JFK disease.

The murdered president dominated the imaginations of more than a
generation of Democratic politicians, and continues as their most
formative role model. President Clinton had a famous JFK complex. No
one who was there will ever forget the moment at the 1992 Democratic
Convention when the famous picture of teenage Bill Clinton pushing
himself forward to reach out to shake hands with President Kennedy
flashed across the screens that loomed over the convention floor. I
was there in Madison Square Garden, and the impact on the crowd was
electric, as if Leonardo's painting had come alive and they were
actually seeing God touch Adam.
Gary Hart in 1984 took JFK disease to the point of physically
imitating Kennedy on the campaign trail, shoving his hands
distractedly in and out of the pockets of his suit jacket, tugging at
his hair (actually this was more like Bobby Kennedy). I saw Mr. Hart
do this with my own eyes the night he won New Hampshire. I was a young
writer at CBS, working on Dan Rather's copy. I thought Mr. Hart
attractive and his imitation suggestive of deep weirdness. It turned
out he did a fabulous verbal imitation of Teddy too.

Sen. Kerry has had his JFK moments too. The other day I watched a clip
of Mr. Kerry's famous testimony to Congress on Vietnam 30 years ago.
Have you ever heard it? It was a total JFK impersonation--"hoff" for
half, etc. In the pictures that exist of Lt. Kerry in Vietnam he seems
startlingly similar in pose, squint and physical attitude to pictures
of John Kennedy with his crew in World War II. PT boats, Swift boats;
"Mahs-CHEW-sitts," the initials JFK . . .

If you saw a generation of Republican candidates doing a physical
imitation of Ronald Reagan or George Bush the elder, would you find it
weird? I think you would. The only person in politics who has ever
tried to morph himself into Ronald Reagan was Al Gore in his first
debate with George W. Bush. He even wore makeup that echoed the
heightened color of Mr. Reagan's cheeks. He wound up looking not like
Mr. Reagan but like a turn-of-the-century madam in a San Francisco
whorehouse, but that's not important. What's important is the jarring
weirdness of seeing one politician trying to make you unconsciously
experience him as another politician.

JFK was an interesting man, privately complicated and publicly merry.
When his motorcade went by in 1960, women--especially nuns, I once
read--couldn't help themselves; they jumped up and down in excitement.
The Kennedy campaign called them the jumpers. Mr. Kerry on the other
hand--well, no one jumps for him.
I didn't think a man with a face that anguished would make it this
far. I mean without other qualities that overwhelm and even counter
the message of the face, which is: I suffer from mild clinical
depression, do you?

Mr. Kerry also has me pondering the now-uneasy relationship of
Democrats and class. JFK was a millionaire's son and all the happier
for it. He benefited from it. To be a millionaire in those days was
strange and glamorous. And he'd been to Harvard. An Irish Catholic
who'd gone to Harvard: Go Jack. Mr. Kerry has used his wealth to get
ahead but it does not work as a plus for him. Wealth doesn't have the
patina it used to for Democrats.

He can't play regular guy, he's clearly not a regular guy. He seems
very much like a man who keeps a secret stash of Grey Poupon. This was
said of George Bush the elder but seems more true of Kerry.

When he speaks, both in prepared text and off the cuff, Mr. Kerry is
boring. I don't mean he doesn't make you laugh, nod or swoon, I mean
he doesn't make you think. A speech should be a text in which,
ultimately, the speaker and the audience are thinking, together. Mr.
Kerry's crowds seem to put up with his remarks and wait patiently till
they end so they can begin to cheer.
That Mr. Kerry is a boring man means the election will be dirty and
vicious. If he were interesting and dynamic and sunny, if he seemed
both experienced and sincere, he arguably could win the upcoming race
without letting his campaign get unduly nasty. But he is a charm-free
zone on the stump, and he has offered no galvanizing political
philosophy or higher meaning. His people will feel the only way he can
win is to be uniquely destructive.

How do we know that is coming? It has already begun. First the
sustained attack on the president's National Guard service. It is
early for such attacks. Second, the indiscreet threat by an unnamed
Kerry adviser as reported weeks ago in the New York Times:
"Everything--everything--is on the table." He, or she, has since been
silenced. But the point was made. And there is the repeated insistence
of those around Mr. Kerry that they're just not going to take it the
way Michael Dukakis did; they'll fight when they're attacked. In this
they are peddling a story line to the press: Democrats are unfairly
attacked and have been too polite, too gentle, too liberal to fight
back.

Will this work? I haven't experienced liberals as too gentle to fight,
and I don't think anyone who pays attention to political and cultural
issues has. I have a feeling voters will experience this tack the way
a mother might experience two kids fighting in the back of the car.
Johnny screams, "Timmy hit me!" Timmy, who in fact nudged Johnny after
Johnny called him stupid, says, "I did not!" Mother admonishes Timmy:
"Leave Johnny alone." Johnny waits till she turns to smile at Timmy
triumphantly and pinch him. Timmy smacks him. "Mommy, Timmy hit me!"

Mothers in this position wind up irritated with both children, but
know in their hearts Johnny is going through a stage in which he's a
weenie, and a whiner too.

Many intelligent people think Kerry will decide to pick Hillary
Clinton for vice president. This is almost touchingly absurd. First of
all, Hillary isn't waiting at home for the guy to call. If she wants
it she'll let him know, but she doesn't want it. Why should she? She's
already been president, as it were. She's already worked hand in hand
in a White House with a guy who wasn't as sharp as she was. Moreover,
she needs more distance between her and the many scandals of the
Clinton era. By 2008 or 2012 they'll be ancient history. Then she will
run, and not for vice president. For now, Kerry doesn't want anyone
who'll overshadow him, and she would. With her on the ticket he'd be
B-roll. Very soon now she'll squelch vice presidential talk. "I made a
promise to the people of New York . . ."
The other woman of the moment, Teresa Heinz, is going to make things
fun. I saw her on C-Span give an eloquent speech a few weeks ago in
Wisconsin--notes, no text, and she didn't refer much to the notes. She
spoke interestingly of her youth, her political views. She has been
wealthy, connected and powerful for so long she has grown mildly bored
with her good fortune, and in all her time in public life she has not
developed much of an edit button. She seems in interviews like someone
who's walked through many smoke-filled rooms, waved her arms
impatiently, and told the maid to plug in a few air fresheners. She is
not awed by media people; she thinks producers and anchormen are
people who are lucky she invited them to dinner at Louisberg Square.

Mark Leibovich of the Washington Post did a brilliant and rather too
detail-rich profile of her last summer. People didn't know she
considered her late husband, John Heinz, to be her real husband until
then. It was startling, and delightful. She hasn't given an indiscreet
interview since. But she will. Before that, however, there will be a
series of long and glowing interviews from big media reporters who a)
need to foster a relationship with a possible future first lady, and
b) want to be the first to change the narrative line from "known crazy
woman" to "colorful, earthy and authentic presence--and secret power
in the campaign."

The good news about Mr. Kerry, and I mean this seriously, is he does
not appear to be insane. We now know Howard Dean was frightened he
might become president, and this perhaps led to what might be called
irrepressibility and irritability. We know Wesley Clark was . . .
well, he seemed a little mad too. The untold story of the Democratic
race is that one of our two great parties had a remarkably shallow
bench. They had no one. But Mr. Kerry is not crazy. You can imagine
him as president. You can imagine him struggling, like Mr. Clinton, to
know what precisely he wanted the presidency for once he had it, but
at least you can imagine him having it.
If he were president he would surround himself with the same
foreign-policy people Clinton did--Richard Holbrook et al. It wouldn't
be insane--Incompetent maybe, confusing certainly, and uncertain
certainly too. They would struggle. The great unmentioned fact of
Democrats in power and foreign policy right now is that they try hard
to do nothing, because if they were to do something it would be what
Republicans do. And they don't want to do that.

They'd be a little lost, maybe a little like JFK.

Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and
author of "A Heart, a Cross, and a Flag" (Wall Street Journal
Books/Simon & Schuster), which you can buy from the OpinionJournal
bookstore. Her column appears Thursdays.

"Kookie Kampbell of Kanada (KKK)" wrote in message
news:c2978n$1qspnp$1@ID-217638.news.uni-berlin.de...

> You forgot, convieniently, Republican Dan Quayle's Kennedy quaff. Oh how
> amusing it was when he was bitch-slapped by a Granddaddy and his pink
> panties slipped down around his ankles.

Quayle drank Kennedys?

ted
who is fairly confident it'll go right over your head
>
>

"Ted Gittinger" wrote in message
news:bzX1c.47129$OH4.24997@fe2.texas.rr.com...
>
> "Kookie Kampbell of Kanada (KKK)" wrote in message
> news:c2978n$1qspnp$1@ID-217638.news.uni-berlin.de...
>
> > You forgot, convieniently, Republican Dan Quayle's Kennedy quaff. Oh
how
> > amusing it was when he was bitch-slapped by a Granddaddy and his pink
> > panties slipped down around his ankles.
>
> Quayle drank Kennedys?
>
> ted
> who is fairly confident it'll go right over your head
> >

No it didn't. It was MY Gaff. He, he.

Ted Gittinger wrote:
>
> "Kookie Kampbell of Kanada (KKK)" wrote in message
> news:c2978n$1qspnp$1@ID-217638.news.uni-berlin.de...
>
> > You forgot, convieniently, Republican Dan Quayle's Kennedy quaff. Oh how
> > amusing it was when he was bitch-slapped by a Granddaddy and his pink
> > panties slipped down around his ankles.
>
> Quayle drank Kennedys?
>
> ted
> who is fairly confident it'll go right over your head
> >
> >

ted!

A Kennedy quaff. Would that be like one of them there fux passes?

"Richard Rongstad" wrote in message
news:40492C44.BBB9A384@NOSPAMvikiingphoenix.com...
> Ted Gittinger wrote:
> >
> > "Kookie Kampbell of Kanada (KKK)" wrote in message
> > news:c2978n$1qspnp$1@ID-217638.news.uni-berlin.de...
> >
> > > You forgot, convieniently, Republican Dan Quayle's Kennedy quaff. Oh
how
> > > amusing it was when he was bitch-slapped by a Granddaddy and his pink
> > > panties slipped down around his ankles.
> >
> > Quayle drank Kennedys?
> >
> > ted
> > who is fairly confident it'll go right over your head
> > >
> > >
>
> ted!
>
> A Kennedy quaff. Would that be like one of them there fux passes?

Correct.

Well, say la gear.

ted

"George Z Kerry" wrote in message
news:8ape40drlnd7h1afesfsvkp5jg8c2vq5f9@4ax.com...
> JFK Disease
> It's more than "hoff" wacky.
>
> Thursday, March 4, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST
>
> John Kerry certainly looks like a president--the thick steel-wool
> hair, the Lincolnian planes and shadows of his face. He is tall and
> slim and seems serious. He also has the guts to wear salmon-colored
> ties. A red tie is red and a blue tie is blue, and red and blue know
> what color they are. Salmon is a more delicate hue. Salmon can't
> decide what color it is. Sometimes it's pink and sometimes it's
> orange. It's like wearing ambivalence on your shirt. This is an
> unusual thing for a politician to do if it's thought through, and it
> takes courage.
>
> Mr. Kerry seems to me not a man of deep belief but of a certain amount
> of sentiment and calculation. One has the sense he is a liberal
> Democrat because of the time and place in which he was born, that he
> inhaled a worldview as opposed to struggling through to one.
>
> I have been wondering how much of Mr. Kerry's career is an essentially
> unreflective meditation upon the life of John F. Kennedy. Or to put it
> more directly, how much of his professional life has been a case of
> JFK disease.
>
> The murdered president dominated the imaginations of more than a
> generation of Democratic politicians, and continues as their most
> formative role model. President Clinton had a famous JFK complex. No
> one who was there will ever forget the moment at the 1992 Democratic
> Convention when the famous picture of teenage Bill Clinton pushing
> himself forward to reach out to shake hands with President Kennedy
> flashed across the screens that loomed over the convention floor. I
> was there in Madison Square Garden, and the impact on the crowd was
> electric, as if Leonardo's painting had come alive and they were
> actually seeing God touch Adam.
> Gary Hart in 1984 took JFK disease to the point of physically
> imitating Kennedy on the campaign trail, shoving his hands
> distractedly in and out of the pockets of his suit jacket, tugging at
> his hair (actually this was more like Bobby Kennedy). I saw Mr. Hart
> do this with my own eyes the night he won New Hampshire. I was a young
> writer at CBS, working on Dan Rather's copy. I thought Mr. Hart
> attractive and his imitation suggestive of deep weirdness. It turned
> out he did a fabulous verbal imitation of Teddy too.
>
> Sen. Kerry has had his JFK moments too. The other day I watched a clip
> of Mr. Kerry's famous testimony to Congress on Vietnam 30 years ago.
> Have you ever heard it? It was a total JFK impersonation--"hoff" for
> half, etc. In the pictures that exist of Lt. Kerry in Vietnam he seems
> startlingly similar in pose, squint and physical attitude to pictures
> of John Kennedy with his crew in World War II. PT boats, Swift boats;
> "Mahs-CHEW-sitts," the initials JFK . . .
>
> If you saw a generation of Republican candidates doing a physical
> imitation of Ronald Reagan or George Bush the elder, would you find it
> weird? I think you would. The only person in politics who has ever
> tried to morph himself into Ronald Reagan was Al Gore in his first
> debate with George W. Bush. He even wore makeup that echoed the
> heightened color of Mr. Reagan's cheeks. He wound up looking not like
> Mr. Reagan but like a turn-of-the-century madam in a San Francisco
> whorehouse, but that's not important. What's important is the jarring
> weirdness of seeing one politician trying to make you unconsciously
> experience him as another politician.
>
> JFK was an interesting man, privately complicated and publicly merry.
> When his motorcade went by in 1960, women--especially nuns, I once
> read--couldn't help themselves; they jumped up and down in excitement.
> The Kennedy campaign called them the jumpers. Mr. Kerry on the other
> hand--well, no one jumps for him.
> I didn't think a man with a face that anguished would make it this
> far. I mean without other qualities that overwhelm and even counter
> the message of the face, which is: I suffer from mild clinical
> depression, do you?
>
> Mr. Kerry also has me pondering the now-uneasy relationship of
> Democrats and class. JFK was a millionaire's son and all the happier
> for it. He benefited from it. To be a millionaire in those days was
> strange and glamorous. And he'd been to Harvard. An Irish Catholic
> who'd gone to Harvard: Go Jack. Mr. Kerry has used his wealth to get
> ahead but it does not work as a plus for him. Wealth doesn't have the
> patina it used to for Democrats.
>
> He can't play regular guy, he's clearly not a regular guy. He seems
> very much like a man who keeps a secret stash of Grey Poupon. This was
> said of George Bush the elder but seems more true of Kerry.
>
> When he speaks, both in prepared text and off the cuff, Mr. Kerry is
> boring. I don't mean he doesn't make you laugh, nod or swoon, I mean
> he doesn't make you think. A speech should be a text in which,
> ultimately, the speaker and the audience are thinking, together. Mr.
> Kerry's crowds seem to put up with his remarks and wait patiently till
> they end so they can begin to cheer.
> That Mr. Kerry is a boring man means the election will be dirty and
> vicious. If he were interesting and dynamic and sunny, if he seemed
> both experienced and sincere, he arguably could win the upcoming race
> without letting his campaign get unduly nasty. But he is a charm-free
> zone on the stump, and he has offered no galvanizing political
> philosophy or higher meaning. His people will feel the only way he can
> win is to be uniquely destructive.
>
> How do we know that is coming? It has already begun. First the
> sustained attack on the president's National Guard service. It is
> early for such attacks. Second, the indiscreet threat by an unnamed
> Kerry adviser as reported weeks ago in the New York Times:
> "Everything--everything--is on the table." He, or she, has since been
> silenced. But the point was made. And there is the repeated insistence
> of those around Mr. Kerry that they're just not going to take it the
> way Michael Dukakis did; they'll fight when they're attacked. In this
> they are peddling a story line to the press: Democrats are unfairly
> attacked and have been too polite, too gentle, too liberal to fight
> back.
>
> Will this work? I haven't experienced liberals as too gentle to fight,
> and I don't think anyone who pays attention to political and cultural
> issues has. I have a feeling voters will experience this tack the way
> a mother might experience two kids fighting in the back of the car.
> Johnny screams, "Timmy hit me!" Timmy, who in fact nudged Johnny after
> Johnny called him stupid, says, "I did not!" Mother admonishes Timmy:
> "Leave Johnny alone." Johnny waits till she turns to smile at Timmy
> triumphantly and pinch him. Timmy smacks him. "Mommy, Timmy hit me!"
>
> Mothers in this position wind up irritated with both children, but
> know in their hearts Johnny is going through a stage in which he's a
> weenie, and a whiner too.
>
> Many intelligent people think Kerry will decide to pick Hillary
> Clinton for vice president. This is almost touchingly absurd. First of
> all, Hillary isn't waiting at home for the guy to call. If she wants
> it she'll let him know, but she doesn't want it. Why should she? She's
> already been president, as it were. She's already worked hand in hand
> in a White House with a guy who wasn't as sharp as she was. Moreover,
> she needs more distance between her and the many scandals of the
> Clinton era. By 2008 or 2012 they'll be ancient history. Then she will
> run, and not for vice president. For now, Kerry doesn't want anyone
> who'll overshadow him, and she would. With her on the ticket he'd be
> B-roll. Very soon now she'll squelch vice presidential talk. "I made a
> promise to the people of New York . . ."
> The other woman of the moment, Teresa Heinz, is going to make things
> fun. I saw her on C-Span give an eloquent speech a few weeks ago in
> Wisconsin--notes, no text, and she didn't refer much to the notes. She
> spoke interestingly of her youth, her political views. She has been
> wealthy, connected and powerful for so long she has grown mildly bored
> with her good fortune, and in all her time in public life she has not
> developed much of an edit button. She seems in interviews like someone
> who's walked through many smoke-filled rooms, waved her arms
> impatiently, and told the maid to plug in a few air fresheners. She is
> not awed by media people; she thinks producers and anchormen are
> people who are lucky she invited them to dinner at Louisberg Square.
>
> Mark Leibovich of the Washington Post did a brilliant and rather too
> detail-rich profile of her last summer. People didn't know she
> considered her late husband, John Heinz, to be her real husband until
> then. It was startling, and delightful. She hasn't given an indiscreet
> interview since. But she will. Before that, however, there will be a
> series of long and glowing interviews from big media reporters who a)
> need to foster a relationship with a possible future first lady, and
> b) want to be the first to change the narrative line from "known crazy
> woman" to "colorful, earthy and authentic presence--and secret power
> in the campaign."
>
> The good news about Mr. Kerry, and I mean this seriously, is he does
> not appear to be insane. We now know Howard Dean was frightened he
> might become president, and this perhaps led to what might be called
> irrepressibility and irritability. We know Wesley Clark was . . .
> well, he seemed a little mad too. The untold story of the Democratic
> race is that one of our two great parties had a remarkably shallow
> bench. They had no one. But Mr. Kerry is not crazy. You can imagine
> him as president. You can imagine him struggling, like Mr. Clinton, to
> know what precisely he wanted the presidency for once he had it, but
> at least you can imagine him having it.
> If he were president he would surround himself with the same
> foreign-policy people Clinton did--Richard Holbrook et al. It wouldn't
> be insane--Incompetent maybe, confusing certainly, and uncertain
> certainly too. They would struggle. The great unmentioned fact of
> Democrats in power and foreign policy right now is that they try hard
> to do nothing, because if they were to do something it would be what
> Republicans do. And they don't want to do that.
>
> They'd be a little lost, maybe a little like JFK.
>
> Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and
> author of "A Heart, a Cross, and a Flag" (Wall Street Journal
> Books/Simon & Schuster), which you can buy from the OpinionJournal
> bookstore. Her column appears Thursdays.
>
>

You forgot, convieniently, Republican Dan Quayle's Kennedy quaff. Oh how
amusing it was when he was bitch-slapped by a Granddaddy and his pink
panties slipped down around his ankles.

Ted Gittinger wrote:
>
> "Richard Rongstad" wrote in message
> news:40492C44.BBB9A384@NOSPAMvikiingphoenix.com...
> > Ted Gittinger wrote:
> > >
> > > "Kookie Kampbell of Kanada (KKK)" wrote in message
> > > news:c2978n$1qspnp$1@ID-217638.news.uni-berlin.de...
> > >
> > > > You forgot, convieniently, Republican Dan Quayle's Kennedy quaff. Oh
> how
> > > > amusing it was when he was bitch-slapped by a Granddaddy and his pink
> > > > panties slipped down around his ankles.
> > >
> > > Quayle drank Kennedys?
> > >
> > > ted
> > > who is fairly confident it'll go right over your head
> > > >
> > > >
> >
> > ted!
> >
> > A Kennedy quaff. Would that be like one of them there fux passes?
>
> Correct.
>
> Well, say la gear.
>
> ted


Say L.A. Gear?

Oh! I always wondered what the kids had on their t-shirts,
they are just showing off in French, expressing fisofoly.

Artists! "David Crosby Arrested at New York Hotel" - gun, knives
and dope in his luggage, 1985 drug conviction in Dallas resulted
in one year in prison before conviction overturned on appeal,
AP, Sat. Mar. 6, 2004.

--
"Whenever I know that an artist is trying to raise
my consciousness, I have flashbacks of Jane Fonda,
Sissy Spacek and Jessica Lange lecturing Congress
about the realities of farm life." - Brad Holland.