This admission will age me – and I’m not happy about that – but I remember extremely well how John F. Kennedy in 1960 made his fellow candidates for president look like a group of tired lounge lizards.

He made Minnesota Senator Hubert Horatio Humphrey sound like he was selling vacuum cleaners in a retirement community.

He made Texas Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson look like he was waiting for the taxi to take him out of the bar. And Missouri Senator Stuart Symington started looking like an ancient messenger in an airport terminal carrying a sign that read: “Stu Symington.”

It’s happening again this election period.  Neither John McCain nor Mitt Romney are natural bores or slugs, but in the light of Rudy Giuliani’s festive entourage, they are starting to show their boring and sluggish aspects perhaps for the first time in their lives.

In 1960, it was JFK’s Irish-American entourage with all its electric blarney that made everyone else in that election year look like a bunch of gloomy nobodies.  Of course, this was hardly fair to the competition of the period.  It was only when Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey managed to remove themselves from the Kennedy party lights that they could show people they had their own lighting systems.

Giuliani doesn’t have the Kennedy hair and teeth, and he doesn’t have JFK’s famed “Irish Mafia” backing him.  In fact, Giuliani is not about to start creating a similar legend of an “Italian Mafia” supporting his campaign.  The truth is that Cousin Rudy has already put a great many of those “good fellas” in prison, and they ain’t going to vote no more.

What Giuliani’s campaign does have is the quality of New York City – thumbs up, verbally combative, bite-your-head-off, real laughter, undefeatable.  Everyone in the country has remained fascinated in New York City since it survived 9/11 with its competitive spirit better than ever.  This may be why in the first really open election since 9/11 we may see three New York representatives running against each other for President.  Surely we want someone in the White House now who has taken a punch and then said, “Is that the best you got?”

When John F. Kennedy was an aggressive young child, the available ambition for an Irish-American boy was to be a boxing champion of the world like Irish-Americans Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney and James “Cinderella Man” Braddock.  Those were the days when every Irish-American who did what you had to reach a pinnacle was either a “Cinderella Man” or a “Cinderella Woman.”

In the 1950’s when Rudy was a boy growing up in Brooklyn, the heavyweight champion of the world was Rocky Marciano.  For all Italian children, this was the real Rocky, an undefeated slugger who barely ever stepped backwards and when he was hit, gave his opponent body language that said, “Is that the best you got?”

There is another Giuliani that emerges later in the evenings of that period, when the young boy reportedly would go to bed to the music of Verdi.  How Giuliani was able to manage and finally subdue the unprecedented drama pf 9/11 can perhaps be better understand if we were to watch the CD that stars Placido Domingo in the title role of Verdi’s “Otello.”

However, not every Republican is happy with all this exposure of Guiliani’s Italian “passione.”  Giuliani is on the verge of becoming the first Italian-American president, and Republicans are not widely known these days for supporting ethnic breakthroughs.

So many of them are doing what they did in 1960 – counting on the intervention of a jowly, beady-eyed cop like Richard Nixon or Fred Thompson to break up the ethnic party.

I should add no one has much use for the real Fred Thompson, a bit actor who when he runs out of money becomes a highly-paid lobbyist for the pro-choice movement.  His followers instead like the Hollywood character Thompson once played, the unflappable tough prosecutor of “Law and Order.” Another apparent reason why Fred Thomson is being urged to run for president is not that he would have any chance to defeat either Hillary or Obama, but he doesn’t look or act the least bit Italian.  I know that sounds harsh for his following, but can you think of any other reason for his candidacy?

But Fred Thompson is reluctant to get into this race.  He is enough of an acting professional to remember what happened to Nixon against Kennedy in 1960.  Instead of busting Kennedy down to size, the grim Nixon became part of Kennedy’s show, as if he were playing the part of the Officer Bull Pup in the old cartoon of the fifties “Krazy Kat.”

Yes, I have aged myself once again.  But I am sure that Giuliani watched “Krazy Kat” in the Fifties just as I once did.

Chris Sharp
Commentary

Chris Sharp is an Educator and a prize-winning professional writer. His commentaries represent his own opinions and not necessarily the views of any organization he may be affiliated with or those of the West Ranch Beacon.