The Kennedy clan went into conniptions last week over the use of footage of the martyred president praising tax cuts in advertisements promoting the Bush tax plan.
Yet as Charles Krauthammer noted in his Washington Post column, "the ads are perfectly reasonable. . . . The Kennedy tax cut returned to the wealthiest Americans 26 cents on every marginal dollar they earned. The Bush tax cut would return less than 7 cents." The real problem: "tamper with the memory of John F. Kennedy and the guardians of the flame will strike you down for sacrilege."
Well, we'll risk the flame by amplifying the point. Ted, Caroline, et al. probably shouldn't protest too loudly, since JFK was no liberal by today's standards and was probably closer to Bush than to them. Indeed, he derided liberals as "honkers." As Chris Matthews recounts in his book Kennedy and Nixon, JFK shared Nixon's contempt for "Hiss types":
"They're not queer at State, but . . . " he told Charlie Bartlett, "They're sort of like Adlai." Kennedy hated being grouped with such people in the public mind. "I'd be very happy to tell them I'm not a liberal," he declared in a Saturday Evening Post interview. . . . "I never joined the Americans for Democratic Action. . . . I'm not comfortable with those people."