'Many people have likened the response to Mr. Obama’s appeal for civic engagement to the response to similar appeals by President John F. Kennedy during the 1960s. Then, as now, many economists were skeptical. The Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, for example, began the opening chapter of his 1962 book, “Capitalism and Freedom,” by quoting the already-famous passage from Kennedy’s inaugural address in which he said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Mr. Friedman seemed to find the statement unintelligible, or at any rate not “worthy of the ideals of free men in a free society.”
“The free man,” he wrote, “will ask neither what his country can do for him, nor what he can do for his country.”
SOME economists seem similarly baffled by the exuberance inspired by the Obama candidacy. But while homo economicus may be unresponsive to calls for sacrifice for the common good, the plain fact is that many people find such calls compelling.'
I one of those who doesn't see the eye candy in Obama. The Kennedyesque appeal is too contrived.
We'll see if the convention delegates will eat it up.
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