From Jann Wenner’s interview with Barack Obama in Rolling Stone:

You were endorsed by Bob Dylan a few days ago. What’s that mean to you?
I’ve got to say, having both Dylan and Bruce Springsteen say kind words about you is pretty remarkable. Those guys are icons.

Do you have any favorite Dylan songs?
I’ve got probably 30 Dylan songs on my iPod. I think I have the entire Blood on the Tracks album on there. Actually, one of my favorites during the political season is “Maggie’s Farm.” It speaks to me as I listen to some of the political rhetoric.

Obama joins a long line of politicians who’ve endorsed Dylan. Despite Wenner’s assertion, I think the record remains that Dylan hasn’t endorsed any of them.

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Just a random musing on Obama here: It doesn’t take a rocket scientist, or a political scientist for that matter, to observe that many in the Democratic Party have been looking for a new Kennedy ever since JFK left the scene ahead of schedule. Young, eloquent, dashing; a candidate of generational change. You could see some of this in the surge for Gary Hart in 1984, and you could see some of it in what certain people wanted and hoped for Bill Clinton to be. But the whole Kennedy-surrogate syndrome has never come so close to total consummation as it has with the candidacy of Barack Obama. It didn’t even need Caroline Kennedy to write her endorsement of Obama in the NY Times ( “A President Like My Father”), but that certainly demonstrated the extent to which the mantle has been passed on quite consciously and without reservation.

In researching something else today, I happened to run into a speech of JFK’s, and it’s what brought all this to mind, because in reading it I couldn’t help wonder at the comparison between Kennedy and Obama, and by extension the Democratic Party of then versus today.

The speech was given in Boston the day before the 1960 presidential election. Excerpts are at this link; my own excerpts below. Kennedy is drawing distinctions between his policies and those of the Republican Richard M. Nixon. You might well call it the “peace through strength” speech.

Mr. Nixon believes that peace can be achieved through conferences and commissions, through meetings and good-will tours through special missions and propaganda gimmicks. But words and gestures, talks and visits, will not bring peace in the future, just as they have failed to bring peace during the past 8 years.

We face a ruthless and implacable enemy bent on world domination. An enemy supremely confident of its ultimate victory and willing to seek that victory by whatever method seems likely to succeed.

The Soviet Union recognizes and respects only one obstacle to its ambitions and that is the strength of its opponents; only a strong and vital America can convince the Communists that any attempt at armed aggression will cost them too dearly to be worth the gamble; only a strong and vital America can maintain the leadership of the alliance of free nations. Only a strong and vital America can maintain the leadership of the alliance of free nations. Only a strong and vital America can become the model of Democratic progress to the newly emerging nations who are looking for guidance and for help.

Therefore, if elected, I pledge myself and my party to begin work immediately on a program to achieve peace through strength.

First, we will strenghten our military power to the point where no aggressor will dare attack, now or in the future. Two days ago an independent study made for the Department of the Army concluded that unless we acted immediately we might “become a world power inferior to the U.S.S.R.” But America must not become inferior to any nation. For an inferior America endangers peace and the survival of freedom. Therefore, we will build a mobile retaliatory force incapable of destruction by surprise attack, and modernize and strengthen our conventional forces so as to deter limited war.

He goes on to talk about also strengthening America economically. Some of that rhetoric you could imagine coming out of Senator Obama’s mouth. But all of the above, I think, you could never imagine Obama saying, or, for that matter, anyone in a leadership position of the modern Democratic Party. It’s been a long, strange trip indeed.

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