FRAMESHOP:FRAMESHOP: JFK 1960 ACCEPTANCE SPEECH

As I get ready,  along with the rest of the world,  to listen to Barack Obama's DNC acceptance speech tonight, I decide to go back and listen to John F. Kennedy's 1960 acceptance speech.  There has been a great deal of murmuring about Obama 'emulating' JFK, who also moved his acceptance speech to an outdoor stadium.

Kennedy was a great speaker.  It is well worth warming up for tonight by listening to his words--almost 50 years old, and still resonant. 

Kennedy's big concern that comes across in the speech is what he called 'a new and hazardous risk' of nominating a Catholic as party standard bearer in a Presidential election.  Different times, but--so it seems--a similar concern for boundary crossing and barrier breaking pervades the 2008 DNC.

Kennedy then went on to say that his religion 'is not relevant.'  It has to be one of the great lines in the history of American Presidential rhetoric. 

What was relevant in Kennedy's mind were all the 'so many serious challenges, so many great opportunities, so many burdensome responsibilities' that the nation faced.

Similar to what John Kerry said of John McCain in his speech to the DNC, Kennedy described Nixon (his opponent) as having taken up both sides of every issue.  Yet another similarity.

Kennedy then said these words that bring a chill to my spine, even though I was still 7 years in the offing:

Our task is not merely one of itemizing Republican failures. Nor is that wholly necessary. For the families forced from the farm do not need to tell us of their plight. The unemployed miners and textile workers know that the decision is before them in November. The old people without medical care, the families without a decent home, the parents of children without a decent school: They all know that it's time for a change.

We are not here to curse the darkness; we are here to light a candle.

Barack Obama has never said, of course, that 'change' was a campaign theme of his invention.  It is a recurrent theme--perhaps the only theme--in Presidential elections.  Kennedy framed his campaign in terms of 'change,' too.

I am sometimes sad that we are no longer in an era where speech writers can craft lines like, 'We are no here to curse the darkness; we are here to light a candle.'   I often feel I was born 20 years too late.  But I like to think that Obama will provide a memorable line such as this one.  Obama's style is not the Kennedy-era 'grand' style--the Horatian style of speaking with a gravitas reserved for the political dais. And yet, Obama speaks in a way that inspires people to reach for their pens and their recorders.  It is exciting thinking about what awaits us.

There is, however, a question at the heart of this election that is far greater than speaking style and. It is a question that connected Kennedy to Lincoln and which also weaves Obama into the great stretch of historical figures.

Kennedy raised the question as he turned towards his conclusion: survival.  Of course, the threat of 'communism' is no longer on our minds as it was in 1960s, but with that caveat, consider how relevant Kennedy's words still seem to us, today:

For the harsh facts of the matter are that we stand at this frontier at a turning-point of history. We must prove all over again to a watching world, as we said on a most conspicuous stage, whether this nation, conceived as it is with its freedom of choice, its breadth of opportunity, its range of alternatives, can compete with the single-minded advance of the Communist system.

Can a nation organized and governed such as ours endure?

That is the real question.

Have we the nerve and the will? Can we carry through in an age where we will witness not only new breakthroughs in weapons of destruction, but also a race for mastery of the sky and the rain, the ocean and the tides, the far side of space, and the inside of men's minds?

That is the question of the New Frontier.

That is the choice our nation must make -- a choice that lies not merely between two men or two parties, but between the public interest and private comfort, between national greatness and national decline, between the fresh air of progress and the stale, dank atmosphere of "normalcy," between dedication of mediocrity.

I believe deeply that the question that weighed on Kennedy's mind, as it did on Lincoln's, is also the question that weighs on Obama's mind: Can a nation organized and governed such as ours endure?

Of course there will be a United States; of course it will be a nation.  But will it be a great nation or will it descend into mediocrity? 

Without being critical of anyone else who ran in this election, I believe that Barack Obama's shares a in a great tradition of American leadership in that he has the ability to convince people that we can once again thwart mediocrity--and all we have to do is work together.

I think that is important because I believe, as Emerson did, that mediocrity is not just a quality of things that we use and make and purchase, but a set of habits that weighs us down, growing heavier with time.   

To be fair,  the similarity between the stakes in the 1960 election and the stakes in the 2008 election are probably greater than the similarities between Kennedy and Obama.  But if there is an overlap, it is that uncanny ability to use one's voice to focus people on progress--as complicated and contradictory as that century's old concept may be. 

Without that skill in our leaders, so many of us would indeed be left to curse the darkness.

 

© 2008 Jeffrey Feldman, Frameshop