Recently, both Sen. Edward Kennedy and his niece Caroline favorably compared Barack Obama to their immortal relation John F. Kennedy. Which begs the question -

                                            Is Barack really like Jack? 

The idea has a musky, feel-good notion, especially for those partial to 60's nostalgia. Certainly the comparison is plausible

...on the surface. 

          For example, both are…

          ...Ivy Leaguers – Kennedy graduated from Harvard, where he majored in International Affairs. Obama went to Columbia with an emphasis on International Affairs and then graduated from Harvard Law School.

          ...relatively young – Obama will be 47 by Election Day. At 43, Kennedy was the youngest president ever elected (Theodore Roosevelt was 42 when he became president after the assassination of William McKinley).

         ...“minorities” - Obama is half African-American and would be the first racial minority to become President. Kennedy was the first Catholic, and to date the only one, to become Chief Executive. His religion was a major concern for many Protestant voters, with Catholicism being the largest religious denomination in the US at the time (25%).   

          ...sitting Senators – Senators are often nominated but rarely elected. Indeed, JFK was the last incumbent Senator elected President.

          ...best-selling authors – Blatantly promoted by his famous father, Kennedy saw his Harvard thesis on Britain’s reluctant entry into World War II become a wildly successful volume called Why England Slept. Over a decade later, he won a Pulitzer for Profiles in Courage, a sketch of eight US Senators who held to their convictions despite much opposition. 

              Soon after graduating from Harvard, Obama wrote the biographical Dreams from My Father, which sold extremely well.  Over a decade later, he was even more successful with The Audacity of Hope, a domestic policy treatise written for a general audience.

           ...and highly charismatic - Youthful vigor emanated from both men. They both campaigned heavily on a theme of hopeful but ambiguous “change,” aiming to take the White House after eight years of folksy but conservative presidents in Eisenhower and George W.

But is it a fair comparison? In a word - no.         

          On more substantive issues, the two men are as different as two Democrats can be, specifically...

        ...Barack was from a middle class background - Both his parents were academics with no major political ties.  After college, he worked as an administrator for Chicago's low-income housing system. Elected three times to the Illinois State Senate, he entered the US Senate in 2004, beating his Republican opponent with 70% of the vote.   

       ...Jack inherited his political career - Highly intelligent and naturally competitive, Kennedy nonetheless had no inclination to enter politics. Journalism would likely have been his chosen profession. But the death of his eldest brother Joe in World War II promoted him to the flagship of his father's ambitions. A successful run for the US House of Representatives in 1946, heavily bankrolled by Joseph Kennedy Sr., set his career in motion. 

...and most importantly...

      ...Barack prefers negotiation and humanitarian aid - He opposed the Second Gulf War early on, and endorses a rapid scale-down. In regards to Iran, he has publicly stated a desire to use multilateral talks in the Middle East, including with Syria and Lebanon. Though he has been relatively muted on the military budget, he does not support an increase. And unlike Jack, he never served in the Armed Forces.

        ...Jack was a Hawk - When leaders are assassinated, they are often wrapped in victimhood and anointed with rose water. Even the most authoritarian among them take on the halo of martyrdom, and past faults are quickly forgotten. Such was the case with Kennedy. Painted today as Arthur of the American Camelot, an idealist after the elusive grail of peace and brotherhood, he was in fact a military conservative and proud of it. 

            In 1960 he ran a successful campaign depicting Vice President Nixon and outgoing President Eisenhower as being soft on communism. Warning of a perilous (and non-existent) missile gap, he pledged a buildup of nuclear and conventional forces, and accomplished that end his three years. The nation's thermonuclear tonnage increased nearly 200% under his administration, and Special Forces went up 800%. His Bay of Pigs fiasco and deployment of US nuclear missiles in Turkey helped spark the Cuban Missile Crisis. Eisenhower had fewer than one thousand military advisors in Vietnam. Kennedy propped that up to 15,000. Half of the U.S. Budget during his tenure went to National Defense.