Deja Vu

WASHINGTON (AP) - New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson on Sunday announced that he was withdrawing his nomination to be President-elect Barack Obama's commerce secretary amid a grand jury investigation into how some of his political donors won a lucrative state contract.

Richardson's withdrawal was the first disruption of Obama's Cabinet process and the second "pay-to-play" investigation that has touched Obama's transition to the presidency. The president-elect has remained above the fray in both the case of arrested Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and the New Mexico case.

Leftists desperately want to see the Obama presidency as a return of Camelot where they can recapture the magic and mystique of the Kennedy administration. However every day seems to bring more evidence that we are in for a rerun of the Clinton years.

Maybe this is simply the best the Democrat party can do nowadays. After all if JFK were in politics today he would be a Republican neo-conservative. He campaigned against Nixon by claiming that the Eisenhower administration had let the US fall behind the USSR in strategic weapons. He cut the top marginal income tax rate dramatically in order to stimulate economic activity. He created the US Army Special Forces (Green Berets). He promised to help any friend and fight any foe in defense of liberty. He deployed troops to Vietnam to fight the communists. The budgets he submitted to congress had 60% of their spending on defense and 40% on domestic programs (as opposed to Ronald Reagan's budgets which spent 60% on domestic programs and 40% on defense). He placed an economic embargo on Cuba in an attempt to starve out the communist regime of Fidel Castro. He faced down the Soviet Union over their stationing of nuclear missiles in Cuba.

When you think about it there are really only two things which tie Jack Kennedy to the modern Democrat party. One was his almost unbelievably massive appetite for adulterous affairs, which unites him with Bill Clinton. The other was the fact that he only got elected through voter fraud committed by the Daley machine in Chicago. This puts him squarely in the camp of Barack Obama and Al Franken (and Al Gore, remember he at least tried to steal Florida).

To be fair Democrats aren't the only people to this sort of thing. Republicans like to call themselves "The Party of Lincoln" even though Lincoln's political philosophy was far down the road to socialism. In fact Lincoln was so far down that road that Karl Marx wanted to dedicate an English translation of The Communist Manifesto to Lincoln. Surviving correspondence between the two men reveals that Lincoln demurred only because Marx's atheism would have offended American voters.

The GOP also likes to wrap itself in the mantel of Teddy Roosevelt however his political philosophy was that the Constitution ought not stand in the way of the people getting the legislation that they want and need. And there was also the small matter of him being certifiably insane (however, I still love The Wind and the Lion).