THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

FOR LIBERALS AND THE MEDIA, KENNEDY WAS THE LAST AMERICAN PRESIDENT | 2003-11-22

One thing young people today don't remember is that the successor to Saint John the Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, kept insisting that his native state of Texas was not in the hated South. He said Texas was in the West and had nothing to do with the despised Southern states.

For the media, it was tragic and horrible to go from the young John Kennedy, with his lack of any accent at all -- from the media point of view -- to Lyndon Johnson, with his gross Southern speech.

Kennedy had been born and raised not only on the East Coast, but in Boston itself. Boston is actually north of most of even Canada's population. Kennedy graduated from Harvard. His Cabinet was carefully selected to be from the Northeasterners the media looked upon as The Only True Intellectuals.

For people whose minds are proudly stuck in the 1960s, Johnson was bad, but things got worse. Since Kennedy, every single president has been either 1) a Republican; or 2) a Southerner. Now we have the ultimate nightmare, a Republican president who CLAIMS to be a Southerner!

Every time the Democrats nominate what the hippies and the media would consider a real American for president, a Northern liberal, he gets trounced at the polls: Humphrey, McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis (the guy from Massachusetts in 1988), they all got trounced. Only Carter of Georgia and Clinton of Arkansas were elected by the Democrats.

So no matter how much dirt comes out on St. John the Kennedy, he will be missed until the present media and the Old Hippies all die out.