Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur: Why so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call them?
-- Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1
That exchange was one of John Kennedy's favorites. His instruments were sensitive to the bogus. He might find it very funny that the politicians of 1988 keep trying to summon spirits, notably his own, from the vasty deep of 1960.
Rhetoric comparing 1988 with 1960 has a wistful, if cynical, political purpose. It attempts to make a live political connection through the increasingly important American sacrament of memory. It wishes to mobilize nostalgia in order to give glamour and energy to a dismal, weightless campaign. It is politics as seance.
The real connections between the races of 1960 and 1988 are wispy to the point of mere coincidence. A youngish Democratic candidate from Massachusetts (Dukakis, at 54, is eleven years older than Kennedy was in 1960) with an older running mate, a Senator from Texas, campaigns against a sitting Vice President who for eight years served an aging, popular Republican father figure.
They are surface similarities and no more. But they have a fascination as wishful symbols, and are an index of the powerful changes that have occurred in America and the world in the past 28 years. The real meaning of a comparison between the elections of 1960 and 1988 is the vast difference that separates them.
The elections of 1960 and 1988 are brackets enclosing a period of astonishing transformation -- change that has placed the two campaigns in different eras. In 1960 the candidates for the first time debated on television, and politics began an almost metaphysical transformation: the external world was miraculously reconvened as powdered images upon America's internal screen. Electrons fetched out of the air poured the circus directly into the living room, into the bloodstream -- just as they would inject Viet Nam into the center of American consciousness.
This year represents something close to a dismantling of the American presidential campaign. The candidates perform simulations of encounters with the real world, but the exercise is principally a series of television visuals, of staged events created for TV cameras. The issues have become as weightless as clouds of electrons, and the candidates mere actors in commercials.
Karl Marx said that historical events and personalities enact themselves first as tragedy and then, in their repetition, as farce. Some of the imitations and reincarnations of J.F.K. have had traces of the farcical. In 1984 Gary Hart, during the primaries, slipped into a bizarre physical impersonation that had him descending the stairs of airplanes with just the gingerly J.F.K. inclination of bad back and his right hand tucked into his jacket pocket, the thumb protruding in the way that Kennedy's always did. The American voter began to think of Madame Tussaud's, or of Elvis impersonators.