Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana this month floated a run for president, with a catch: he’d consider it if the GOP field consisted of a “bunch of goobers.”
He apparently doesn’t see the irony in that.
He also seems not to have noticed that the Republican field is the proverbial clown car full of goobers. JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, and Tom Cotton, among others, are all vying for the title of Biggest Goober. And if the contest is that crowded, Senator Kennedy may have to take himself up on his own offer.
If the unthinkable happened, if he decided to run — and after the last few years, why wouldn’t that be a real possibility? — would America be ready for another President John Kennedy?
We’ve had a pair of John Adamses and a pair of George Bushes, but that quartet consisted of fathers and sons. This would be something else entirely: trading an icon of American history for the very “goober” persona the senator claims to despise.
Imagining the worst, that Louisiana’s Kennedy ascends to the presidency, it would be a battle between Camelot vs. Cajun Country. And the differences are stark — or, as Senator Kennedy would say, trying to find common ground between them makes about as much sense as “trying to put pants on a continuous-roll octopus.”
President Kennedy was 43, the youngest ever elected, with a Harvard education and a thick Boston accent to match. He won a Pulitzer, and made one of the most famous lines in American history, “ask not what your country can do for you” a resounding call to action
The second, if he wins, would arrive in the Oval Office as a septuagenarian with a public persona that might be compared to, in his words, “a U-Haul’s Salesman of the Year.”
The first had a crisp New England patrician cadence. He projected youthful, refined leadership. The second wields a thick, performative Southern drawl, dripping with folksy colloquialisms, delivered to reject institutional polish and channel the populist frustration of Cajun Country. He isn’t, again in his words, a “tofu-eating woke-arati”
One was a dashing and debonair man whose televised glamour defined twentieth-century politics. The other explains federal spending as “hogs who have all four feet and their snout in the trough.” Somehow snouts and troughs don’t have the same consequential effect as “Ich bin ein Berliner,” from JFK’s historic speech in West Berlin in 1963.
In 1962, JFK rallied national ambition by declaring that we do things like going to the moon “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” Senator Kennedy, for his part, praised the humility of NASA administrators by chirping: “We need more like you in government. We got too many buttheads.”
On government accountability, President Kennedy prophetically claimed, “The very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society.” Senator Kennedy, confronted with proof of Donald Trump’s misconduct in the Jack Smith hearing last month, said it makes himwant to “throw up in his mouth.” Both are making the same point, but with manners like that, only one of them would be invited to dinner at Buckingham Palace. Well, that’s a little unfair because JFK did have dinner there, with his wife, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip in June of 1961.
On civil rights, President Kennedy used a televised national address to frame the issue as “a moral one, as old as the scriptures and as clear as the Constitution.” Senator Kennedy drew condemnation for racially charged rhetoric when he claimed that without American intervention, Mexicans would be eating cat food out of a tin can and living in a tent.
That is not a gap in style. It is a gap in character.
And yet, in fairness, Senator Kennedy wasn’t, quoting him, “homeschooled by a day drinker.” He is a Rhodes Scholar with an Oxford law degree and a University of Virginia law degree, which means the hillbilly act is exactly that, an act, with real brains behind the curtain.
He’s no dummy. He’s something more interesting. He’s a smart man who has figured out that deceptively playing the goober gets more votes in Louisiana than touting his scholarship.
But surprise! There’s one upside to a second President Kennedy. Nothing would have to be renamed. The Kennedy Center, JFK Airport, and Kennedy Space Center would all remain just as they are. The only question is whether, if he decides to emulate Donald Trump’s obsessive narcissism, he’d start claiming the monuments as his own. But if Senator Kennedy is as smart as his credentials say, then he’d most likely leave well enough alone.
In the end, JFK’s elite polish was utilized to elevate the country, and give it pizzazz after eight years of the dour Dwight Eisenhower. Senator Kennedy, with Oxford on his résumé, has chosen to use his talents to make Washington laugh at itself — and him — and, in the process, fool the country on the idea that the smartest guy in the room should sound like the dumbest.
Somewhere in modern American politics, the inspirational creed of “ask not” is trying to be replaced by a senator from Louisiana telling us to watch out for the goobers.
And if he runs, he might be the biggest one in the bunch.
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