Is Barack Obama a good man?

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the charismatic and popular 35th President of the United States, was a war-hero who'd managed to get his PT boat cut in two by a Japanese destroyer. He was the son of a mob-connected bootlegger, and he won the presidency in one of the closest elections in American history — his margin of victory came from manufactured votes in Chicago and dead people voting in alphabetical order in the Texas Rio Grande Valley. A compulsive adulterer (despite being the father of young children and husband of one of the most beautiful women in the world), he deliberately and rigorously concealed from the American public both his infidelities and his very serious health problems, the latter of which included him secretly taking drugs that could have affected his mood and perception.

His foreign policy was a dangerous farce. By approving, and then withdrawing American support in the middle of, the Bay of Pigs operation in April 1961, he created an impression of irresolution and ineptitude, which he then promptly reinforced in a disasterous face-to-face summit with Soviet premiere Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in June 1961. Khrushchev, in response, escalated the long-simmering tensions over Berlin by throwing up the Berlin Wall in August 1961 and then securing the rest of the Iron Curtain borders with the West, followed by increased Soviet support for the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong, and then by the installation of offensive nuclear missiles in Cuba in October 1962. The resulting crisis, including an American naval blockade of Cuba, brought us closer to nuclear war than we've ever been before or since. To secure the missiles' removal, Kennedy had to make a secret promise to withdraw American missiles from Turkey and a pledge that the U.S. would not invade Cuba to overthrow Castro's government there — thereby selling the Cuban people into communist oppression and guaranteeing an anti-American Soviet client state 90 miles off the coast of Florida that has, in fact, outlived the Soviet Union and persists to this day. JFK's inconsistent policies in Vietnam also led to the Diem assassination in November 1963, in connection with which the most competent elements of that struggling ally's army were also purged and several years' progress against the Viet Cong lost; as a result, LBJ was obliged to intervene more dramatically, with vastly more American ground troops, in 1964 and 1965.

Domestically, JFK succeeded in passing some tax cuts, but most of the rest of his "New Frontier" agenda, including the civil rights portion of it, was bottled up in Congress. Arguably, the greatest success of his entire administration was his support for the nascent American space program, which in May 1961 he committed to the goal of a moon landing by the end of the decade. Cynics will say that even that had disguised motives — a backhanded way to re-label money that otherwise would have been called part of the defense budget, something to bribe and occupy LBJ, and a series of tailor-made TV appearances and ticker-tape parades that would reflect glory on JFK.

We'll never know whether Jack Kennedy would have become a more effective president because he was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963. I was a first grader then, in a heavily Democratic state but with Republican parents who'd voted for Nixon in 1960. Yet if asked, I would have said then, without hesitation, either on the day before or the day after he was shot, that John F. Kennedy was "a good man." Of course, I know much more about him now than I did then. I recognize that he was sharp, energetic, patriotic, and a great leader despite his many failings, but overall, I do not much admire John Kennedy. I no longer think that he was anything close to being a good president, much less the "great president" that the circumstances of his death pumped his already inflated reputation into.

Despite all that, however, I still think John F. Kennedy was, on balance, a good man.

I could write a similar series of paragraphs about Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter, respectively the 37th and 39th Presidents. In both of their cases, I'd end up concluding that they started off as "good men," but then went so far astray that I could no longer make that claim for either of them. (In Carter's case, that would actually be based on his post-presidential conduct.)

I likewise will readily conclude that — to move forward from JFK as an arbitrary starting point — LBJ, Ford, Reagan, Bush-41, and Bush-43 have all been "good men."

And I have no doubt at all that despite his political skills and brilliance, Bill Clinton was, and is, a bad man — easily as bad as Nixon ended up becoming, and worse than Carter.

Your mileage may vary. This is obviously a very subjective subject.

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My blogospheric friends Jeff Goldstein and Patrick Frey are engaged in a debate over whether Barack Obama is a "good man." They are both fine advocates, and each makes good points. I think that Jeff's passionate opposition to Sen. Obama, however, has taken him into territory where Patrick and I aren't yet willing to go.

I do not know, for example, if John F. Kennedy personally authorized the details of the voter fraud that was committed on his behalf to get him elected in 1960. I think it's unlikely that he did, although it's likely that he probably was generally aware that there was something crooked being done and that he failed to investigate or interfere. But if it were proved to me that he'd known of and authorized the exact actions, or given a clear authorization that included such actions, then I would change my opinion of him. He had ethical responsibilities that which he clearly failed to fulfill, but I don't think that he was guilty of any actual crime himself, and while that certainly is a black mark in his record, I don't think it outweighs all the other good things that would lead me to conclude that, overall, he was still a good man.

Similarly, if I were to learn that Barack Obama made the decision to turn off his campaign website's credit card anti-fraud measures — an action that cannot be explained on any basis other than an intention to facilitate campaign finance fraud — then I would join Jeff in arguing that Obama is a "a con man and a thief." I am disappointed that Sen. Obama has not yet publicly identified and fired the person or persons who did make that decision, and I would agree that puts his entire new administration under an ethical cloud, just as was the Kennedy Administration by virtue of the voter fraud in Illinois and Texas in 1960. I just don't have the facts I need to draw further conclusions beyond that yet.

But on a sliding scale, with Adolf Hitler and Jesus at either end, there's an awful lot of room in between those ends, and an awful lot of room even between either end and the half-way mark. (NB: I don't intend to define "good" here in a strictly religious sense, and I picked Jesus as someone who I hope is a familiar and noncontroversial exemplar of a righteous and good life; but substitute an Old Testament prophet of your choice, or Buddha, or a hypothetical "maximum goodness" figure if you wish.) Jeff allows that Obama is (or at least he appears to us all to be) a "good politician, sure[, and a] dedicated husband and father." Even if the former isn't worth much territory on my sliding scale, the latter is. So is patriotism. So is a willingness to work hard.

This is an interesting debate, but it's not terribly productive. It's pretty Keith Olbermannesque (and yeah, I'll agree that he's a bad man, although mostly he's just an annoying one). We certainly ought not let this argument generate any hard feelings among those who remain — as I think Patrick, Jeff, and I all are — political opponents of the prospective Obama Administration. Obama's already making decisions that deserve scrutiny, even before January. It's not like we're short of blogging topics.

I still very badly want an answer to my question about the credit card anti-fraud protections: What did Obama know, and when did he know it? And I agree with — and incorporate by reference, as if fully set forth again here — Patrick's many reservations about Obama and his bad policies. I'll add to those that I think Obama has knowingly, and inexcusably, chosen to associate with some bad people — among whom I'd certainly include twisted dollop of evil scum Bill Ayers and convicted politician-buyer Tony Rezko. Obama's decisions to associate with those folks, and with several organizations who shelter and attract bad people, would lead me to agree that Obama has consistently demonstrated very bad judgment.

But "bad man"? Naw, I'm just not there yet. Might get there, but not there yet.

I don't think that's because I'm being "noble," and I would vigorously dispute that it's because I'm being naïve. I'll go so far as to concede that I'm deliberately giving Obama the benefit of the doubt on some of his associations, to call that merely "bad judgment" as opposed to evidence that he, himself, is also a "bad man." And I respect Jeff, and others, who disagree, and I credit them with good faith in making that decision (at the same time I urge them to return that respect to those who haven't).

That's where I come down, anyway. I don't think the president-elect knows or would much care. And you might not either — but hey, nobody forced you to visit this blog, eh?