Should we hope he is—or that he’s not?

In the 45 years since the assassination of John Kennedy, there have been several pretenders to the throne of Camelot, candidates who, propelled by the force of transcendent purpose and stirring rhetoric, seemed capable of sweeping away the failed projects and policies of the leaders who preceded them and ushering in an era in which, led as we should be led, we would become the kind of country we should be. Within five years of Kennedy’s death, there were two, Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy. Eight years later, in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam, there was Jimmy Carter. In 1980, Edward Kennedy. Ronald Reagan presided over what his supporters saw and see as a kind of conservative Camelot. And just four years ago, Howard Dean seemed to hold that kind of promise.

Now there is Barack Obama. Even before Obama’s campaign was anointed by President Kennedy’s brother and daughter, there was something about Obama—the Harvard education, the inspirational rhetoric, the fact that no one of his race has ever attained the White House*, the policy ambiguity that allows followers to project their own beliefs onto him—that brought JFK to mind. Obama encouraged the comparison, including in the historical figures who exemplified his “yes, we can” slogan “a president who chose the moon as our new frontier…”

The quest for Camelot is natural and worthy for both leaders and followers. It would be unbearable to think that the political and economic quarreling that seems to overtake us periodically, the good intentions come to naught, are all we can ever aspire to. That is what makes Obama so reminiscent of Kennedy, the promise that he can bring about solutions—any solutions—to the challenges that face the country, rather than the particular solutions he puts forward.

That is what Clinton and her supporters find so frustrating. On the evidence of the debates, at least, Clinton’s mastery of issues is unequalled. She knows them and she understands them. She sees where they fit in the last forty years and more of political history. She sees the kinds of solutions that should both attract Democratic support and should work once they are put into effect.

And nobody cares; well, not nobody, but all the voters and caucus participants who have catapulted Obama past Clinton.

The Clinton campaign and other Obama skeptics have said that Obama has not said exactly how he will accomplish such a feat. Perhaps he is expecting, Clinton mocked, that “the sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect.”

But although Obama has not described with precision the kind of process he would employ, two facets of his campaign are instructive.

A perceptive column by Jeanne Cummings in the new political journal Politico, perceives in the competing candidates’ health care plans “clues to the different governing style each would bring to the White House.” Clinton’s universal coverage plan envisions a war, not unlike the one she fought and lost in 1993. Her plan starts by proposing universal coverage because, as the candidate has said, “If you don’t start by saying you’re going to achieve universal health care, you will be nibbled to death.” The Clinton plan “recognizes from the outset the deep divides in Washington and the powerful influence of health industry lobbyists,” writes Cummings. “The insurance industry would “push back, [but] it would find itself deep into Clinton’s turf.” With less than commanding House and Senate majorities, Clinton would have to “strongly unite the Senate and House Democratic caucuses and hold them together under an intense lobbying campaign.”

Obama’s approach, by contrast, will be familiar to anyone familiar with community organizing, Obama’s first occupation: Build a coalition of contending interests around a modest proposal, then lead the coalition to more and more ambitious goals. Instead of starting by requiring universal coverage, Obama’s plan requires coverage of children, and offering, but not requiring, an attractive, affordable plan to everyone else, with subsidies for those with low or moderate incomes. “With passage of an initial, more modest, proposal,” Cummings writes, “Obama would then hope to hold a presumably bipartisan coalition to take a more aggressive step that could be more offensive to the industry.”

What happens if Obama’s “come, let us reason together” strategy—Lyndon Johnson’s mantra, less often his practice—doesn’t bring everybody together? What happens if the health care industry unleashes the kind of shock-and-awe counter-offensive on Obama’s modest proposal it deployed against Clinton’s ambitious plan in 1993? What happens, for that matter, if the Republicans unleash the kind of shock-and-awe counter-offensive they have launched against previous Democratic nominees, the kind sketched by Mark Halperin in Time:

Did you know [Obama] supports meeting with the head of terrorist states? Do you know he wants to get rid of your right to own a handgun? Do you know he is calling for the repeal of the law preventing gay marriage? Do you know he is for a trillion-dollar tax increase?

Obama has not faced such an onslaught in the Democratic primaries. But he faced the Clinton version of it—the kind of ready-to-rumble response that some think makes Clinton exactly the right candidate for the Democrats to put up against the Republicans. Running from behind, Clinton tried leveraging an Obama comment about Reagan’s transformation of American politics into an affinity for Reagan’s policies. Bill Clinton tried to take the sting out of his wife’s impending loss by comparing Obama’s campaign to Jesse Jackson’s, implying that Obama was a “black candidate” who would do well only in states with large African American populations.

The Clinton campaign’s bare-knuckle tactics earned them a spate of journalistic slaps on the wrist, and a bigger-than-expected defeat in South Carolina. Since then, Hillary Clinton has kept her husband and her campaign’s rhetoric on a leash. She ended the Texas debate with a conclusion so laudatory of Obama that it was almost elegiac.

That, I think, is the true audacity of hope implicit in Obama’s campaign: that if he can establish a civil political environment, the media and voters will punish the candidate, advocate or special interest that violates it. That a courteous proffer is more likely to engender a courteous response. And that a contest fought under the political equivalent of Marquess of Queensbury rules will produce a consensus solution, not another gridlocked stalemate.

The Kennedy precedent is not encouraging. It’s an inexact parallel, to be sure. Although younger when he was elected than Obama is now, Kennedy had been in Congress longer—six years in the House and eight in the Senate. He didn’t run as the candidate of hope but, in contrast to opponents like Sen. Hubert Humphrey and Adlai Stevenson, as the pragmatic candidate—that year’s equivalent to Hillary Clinton.

In the general election and as president, however, he did call up the winds of hope and optimism, just as Obama is doing today. And there was something different about the Kennedy years. I was not a Kennedy enthusiast; I was too young to vote in 1960, but not too young to volunteer—for Kennedy’s opponent, Minnesota Sen. Hubert Humphrey. But everybody I knew felt, to borrow a trope from Obama, that at that moment, in that election, there was something happening in America. There was a feeling that domestic problems like race and poverty could be overcome, that we could overcome them, that, indeed, they were there so that we could solve them, that foreign adversaries were there so we could defeat them or win them over.

But except for down payments like the Peace Corps and the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the promise of Camelot remained largely unfulfilled when Kennedy was assassinated.^† And not only because his time was cut short. Congress was not enchanted by Camelot, not blown to the side by the winds of change. A Democratic Congress defeated his proposals for aid to education and health care for the poor and elderly. He was unable to budge die-hard southern opposition to civil rights, and he urged restraint, not on the southerners he thought he needed for re-election but on the civil rights movement. I recall a cartoon by the Washington Post’s cartoonist Herblock, depicting Attorney General Robert Kennedy as a waiter serving a black diner a burnt and shriveled piece of meat labeled “civil rights bill.” The cartoon is captioned, “Politics is the art of the possible.”

It was Kennedy’s successor Lyndon Johnson, a politician whom nobody would have confused with Arthur of Camelot, who got laws passed that prohibited discrimination in voting, employment, housing, restaurants and hotels. It was Johnson who declared and funded the war on poverty, Johnson who was responsible for Medicare and Medicaid. Kennedy’s Camelot may have summoned the favorable wind, but it took Lyndon Johnson to captain the ship that caught the wind.

So it may be with Obama. The Republican attack machine may dismember him as it has others. Or it could force him to reply in kind and pull him off his pedestal. Even if elected, his hope of reaching consensus may, as Hillary Clinton and her supporters clearly think, be exposed as naiveté.

Thoughtful Obama supporters do not dismiss such a possibility. But they look back on the Clintons’ history of triangulation, of being willing, even eager, to fight fire with fire, and how meager the returns on that strategy have been. And they are willing to take the chance that Obama offers and vote their hopes rather than their fears.

After all, as the last Democrat to win the White House once said, “If one candidate is trying to scare you and the other one is try get you to think, if one candidate is appealing to your fears and the other one is appealing to your hopes, you better vote for the person who wants you to think and hope.”