Obama Joins FDR and JFK: All Candidates Called Celebrities

Alternet.org
August 07, 2008News & Politics

"This man seeks the highest elective office in the world not primarily as a politician, but as a celebrity. He's the only politician a woman would read about while sitting" in a beauty salon.

The latest silly attack ad from John McCain on Barack Obama as the Paris Hilton of politics? No, it's actually a journalist's comment on John F. Kennedy in 1960.

Ms. Hilton has responded to the McCain smear with a funny video. A more serious response is to point out how similar the charges were against Kennedy in 1960 -- and against Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932.

How about this one: "The Democrats [are] going to nominate a man who, no matter how serious his political dedication might be, [is] indisputably and willy-nilly going to be seen as a great box-office actor."

That's Norman Mailer writing of JFK in his famous 1960 Esquire essay, "Superman Comes to the Supermarket."

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