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Kennedy was an odd mix, sort of like GWB. He advocated tax cuts for the purpose of freeing up commerce and increasing prosperity - a very conservative thing to do.
But he also advocated programs where government stepped in to "help" more and more people - a modern-liberal thing to do.
He was not a conservative. By the standards of the time, he was a middle-of the roader, or mild liberal.
Now, of course, the Democrat party has rocketed so far to the left that JFK would not be able to see it from where he was, despite his frequent liberal tendencies.
The Republican party has also moved considerably to the left from where it was in the early 1960s, too, due in part to the large number of Democrats who quit and came over to join the Repub party (aka "neocons").
Kennedy would be more at home in the partly-liberal Republican party of today, than among the socialist fanatics of the Democrat party. Mostly because Kennedy was NOT a conservative.
If he was so conservative, why did the John Birchers of Dallas off him? Southern Tea Party ancestors hated him with a passion, just like they hate Obama. I don't think he was a conservative.
Tea Party = John Birch Society = KKK. They're one and the same, for the most part from what I can tell by their behaviors. The attempts by the America-haters to label people "liberal" or "conservative" as if that's how normal people in the country identify/classify themselves is just another attempt to weaken America. It's perverse. The constant lunatic fringe attacks on this President have, at their core, the fact that he's a black man ... and they just don't like black people, especially not one who is sleeping in the White House.
I don't doubt that President Kennedy, for the time he was in the Senate and in the Presidency, held views knowledgeable people will identify as "conservative." Same goes for his "liberal" and "moderate" preferences on some issues. And the same people who hate Obama for being black would have or did hate Kennedy because he was a Roman Catholic.
Other than the political crazies of the right-wing ... I believe the majority of people in the country are most comfortable, if they find they have to apply a label to themselves, will say they're "moderate."
The labels "conservative" and "liberal" are relative. In their own times Lincoln, both Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, and Kennedy were considered "liberals" while Buchanan, Harding, Hoover, and Nixon were regarded as "conservatives."
If Ronald Reagan was running for office today I'm sure he would still be considered a conservative, but a moderate one, and many in the "Tea Party" faction would complain he is not conservative enough.
Here ya go..1964 Democratic Party platform.
If you read it without knowing what it was you'd swear it was today's Republican platform
Here's some tidbits of what the Democrats were promoting back then:
Democratic Party Platforms: Democratic Party Platform of 1964
Democracy in America rests on the confidence that people can be trusted with freedom. It comes from the connection that we will find in freedom a unity of purpose stronger than all our differences.
True democracy of opportunity will not be served by establishing quotas based on the same false distinctions we seek to erase, nor can the effects of prejudice be neutralized by the expedient of preferential practices.
The American free enterprise system is one of the great achievements of the human mind and spirit. It has developed by a combination of the energetic efforts of working men and women, bold private initiative, the profit motive and wise public policy, until it is now the productive marvel of mankind.
Every penny of Federal spending must be accounted for in terms of the strictest economy, efficiency and integrity. We pledge to continue a frugal government, getting a dollar's value for a dollar spent, and a government worthy of the citizen's confidence.
Every person who participates in the government must be held to a standard of ethics which permits no compromise with the principles of absolute honesty and the maintenance of undivided loyalty to the public interest.
He was liberal, and not ashamed to say so. Him reducing taxes from 90% to 70% doesn't make him conservative any more than Obama proposing reduction in corporate taxes. Kennedy believed in government playing a big part in helping the poor etc. The "war on poverty" was his idea, although it wasn't put into action until his death, and that being the case he practically invented Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps. Or, if you want to argue those are conservative ideas, then he was a conservative.
He said if a liberal is a person who “cares about the welfare of the people—their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties,” and under that definition, he said, “I’m proud to say I’m a ‘liberal.’”
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