E.J. Dionne recalls President Kennedy's inaugural address, 50 years ago today:
On Jan. 20, 1961, John F. Kennedy began his presidency with a speech at once soaring and solemn. Fifty years on, we have not heard an inaugural address like it. Tethered to its time and place, it still challenges with its ambition to harness realism to idealism, patriotism to service, national interest to universal aspiration.
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A great speech includes lines so memorable that pedestrian orators eventually transform them into cliches. "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." This muscular call for sacrifice has launched a thousand lesser speeches.
"Civility is not a sign of weakness" and "Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate" - staple references whenever politics becomes particularly vicious.
"The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans." And the torch gets passed again and again, whenever a younger politician is marking out generational territory.
It was a compact speech - at 1,355 words, it was less than twice the length of this column. Kennedy, wrote the historian Robert Dallek, insisted that it be brief because "I don't want people to think I'm a windbag." He needn't have worried.
Gail Collins bids a be-sure-to-let-the-door-hit-you-on-the-way-out farewell to Joe Lieberman:
On Wednesday, Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut announced that he won’t be a candidate for re-election in 2012. Normally people look particularly appealing when they’re promising to go away. This time, not so much.
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Plus, he isn’t really leaving. He’s got two years of his term left, during which he will be looking for “new opportunities that will allow me to serve my country.” Do you think that means something involving a large salary and a chance to make multitudinous TV appearances, or a Peace Corps stint in Burkina Faso? Let me see hands.
Meanwhile, the LA Times thinks we'll miss him when he's gone:
When Independent Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut announced Wednesday that he wouldn't seek a fifth term, there was hardly a wet eye in the house. It's hard to find anybody, conservative or liberal, who has nice things to say about Lieberman, who is so disliked in his home state that the threat of competition from a former pro-wrestling promoter was apparently enough to scare him away from the 2012 Senate race. But we suspect Lieberman's detractors will miss him more than they realize.
Yeah, right.
George Will does the tired "government is the problem" routine:
The idea that America's problem of governance is one of inadequate resources misses this lesson of the last half-century: No amount of resources can prevent government from performing poorly when it tries to perform too many tasks, or particular tasks for which it is inherently unsuited.
Matt Miller has a proposal for the Republicans who want to repeal health care:
Republicans need to pass a law that the Congressional Budget Office certifies will cover the same number of uninsured as the Democratic health reform does - 30 million. And it has to do it at lower cost.
If I were President Obama, this is what I would be saying this week. And in the State of the Union address next week. And every time the question comes up.
The logic is simple. If Republicans are serious, they have to accept that it's a national priority to make sure that every American has basic health coverage. Thirty million isn't enough, of course, because the ranks of the uninsured still hover around 50 million. But since Democrats could only muster the will to cover 30 million, that's all we can expect the GOP to match as a measure of seriousness. (Though I'd be happy to see them shame Democrats with a plan to cover more).
New York Times:
A few Congressional Democrats and Republicans will be sitting next to each other on Tuesday night during the State of the Union address, straying from their glowering bunkers on opposite sides of the aisle. It’s a lovely idea, intended to show that ideological divisions do not require personal rancor. But it is essentially a gesture to the cameras, and it should not obscure what remains a wide and fundamentally deep aisle between the parties.
Doyle McManus:
On the most important domestic issues of the day, our two political parties don't merely lay out competing arguments; they inhabit alternative realities.
Inhabiting alternative realities. That's a polite way of putting it, don't you think?