BARONE EXPLAINS IT – AT 10:46 A.M. ET:  There are political analysts, and there are political analysts who know what they're taking about.  Michael Barone is firmly in the second category.  This past week marked the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy's inaugural, and Barone examines the reality of the fading JFK legacy.  From the Washington Examiner:

Last Thursday was the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's inaugural speech and, while the anniversary did not go unmentioned, it got less attention than I expected. I suspect that those of us who can remember that snowy day...are inclined to overestimate the hold that Kennedy has on Americans five decades after he took the oath of office.

Two events just before that anniversary fortify that conclusion and snap the links between us and President Kennedy. On Tuesday, Sargent Shriver died at age 95. This Kennedy in-law never attained elective office as the three Kennedy brothers and assorted offspring did, but he achieved something as important, or more so.

As the first director of the Peace Corps and working with his wife, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, as head of Special Olympics, he created the cultures of two quintessentially American institutions, both with international reach.

And...

The other event delinking us from the Kennedy years was the announcement on Wednesday by Sen. Joseph Lieberman that he would not run for re-election in 2012. Lieberman's political career began in his freshman year at Yale, the year during which John Kennedy was elected president and inaugurated...

...Evidently he could see no way forward in 2012. As he said, "The politics of President Kennedy -- service to country, support of civil rights and social justice, pro-growth economic and tax policies, and a strong national defense -- are still my politics, and they don't fit neatly into today's partisan political boxes anymore."

That analysis stands up to scrutiny. "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill," Kennedy said 50 years and three days ago, "that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty."

Finally...

John Kennedy's inaugural, like Sargent Shriver's institution building, does not fit the partisan template of today's Democratic Party. Kennedy's words come closer to resembling those uttered by another American president, who delivered his first inaugural from the West Front of the Capitol 30 years ago last Thursday, Ronald Reagan. As Shriver's death and Lieberman's retirement suggest, Kennedy's heritage is now national and historic, not contemporary and partisan.

COMMENT:  Very well said.  I grew up in the Democratic Party and worked in Kennedy's '60 campaign.  And I pressed the Republican lever for the first time in my life in 1980, when I voted for Ronald Reagan, himself a former Democrat.  As we said at the time, we didn't leave the Democratic Party, it left us. 

Kennedy's foreign-policy and defense ideals are today found in the GOP, not his own party.  JFK couldn't get anywhere near the nomination for president in the party of Barack Obama. 

What a sad spectacle.

January 23, 2011