The Kennedy Mystique: Further Into The Mist
Matthew Yglesias tries to make sense out of Gallop’s opinion polling on presidents by age, and comes up puzzled, especially by Kennedy’s over-performance across the ideological spectrum.
“I can’t imagine a coherent ideological viewpoint that would justify the high ratings Americans over-35 give to Kennedy… if you could take the Kennedy-Johnson years as a whole, then divide them up into one presidency that was dominated by Vietnam and another one that’s responsible for Civil Rights and the Great Society, then you’d have one shitty president and one great president. A lot of people seem to have basically decided to divide things up this way and call the shitty president “Johnson†while the good president is called “Kennedy.†That, however, doesn’t have a great deal to do with reality.“
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