The comparisons between Democratic candidates and John F. Kennedy are often overblown. But when Barack Obama rolled into Charleston, West Virginia, on Thursday, the locals were struck by at least one parallel.
On his first campaign swing to West Virginia, Obama delivered a hard-hitting speech detailing how the war in Iraq had cost in economic terms. (“For what folks in this state have been spending on the Iraq war, we could be giving health care to nearly 450,000 of your neighbors, hiring nearly 30,000 new elementary school teachers, and making college more affordable for over 300,000 students,” he told supporters at the University of Charleston.)
In introducing Obama, Gov. Joe Manchin said, “The last time we had this type of excitement in the state of West Virginia, I was a young boy in 1960…John Kennedy was at that time coming through on the historic campaign that he ran. The rest is history. West Virginia has gone down in history for putting him over the top.”
Obama’s staffers did not miss the opportunity to play up the comparison, distributing copies a story from the Charleston Daily Mail from April 11, 1960, detailing Kennedy’s visit. The crux of the story was about religion. Kennedy was campaigning as a Catholic candidate in a state that was 95 per cent Protestant–an issue that seemed to obsess political insiders then as much as Obama’s race and his own African-American church today.
“The primary is expected to shed some light on a question that haunts many Democratic professionals,” said the Charleston story from 1960, written by the Associated Press. “Would the election chances of Kennedy, if he were to become the first Roman Catholic presidential nominee in 32 years, be seriously hurt by his religion?”
