'We need a leader,' not a politician

The murdered young president had embodied transformation, the startling power of the new, a sense of promise, optimism, unexplored frontiers. Four decades of revelations about backstage politics, marital infidelities, gangsters and Marilyn Monroe have not stopped people from looking back on that era with longing. To his admirers back then, Kennedy represented a promise that we the people could be better than we were.
Much as Barack Obama represents for his admirers now.

That realization was crystalized for me by two events of recent days.