Carney: 2020 Democrats Turn Kennedy’s ‘Ask Not’ on Its Head

The Democratic Party demonstrated Tuesday night how far leftward the party has lurched by inverting the call to public service issued by John F. Kennedy into a call for a government that panders to those making demands.

“My fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country,” Kennedy said in his innaugural address.

It is one of the most famous lines in one of the most famous speeches by an American president.

Kennedy said he was addressing this call for self-sacrifice for the common good to a “new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage.”

Kennedy said at his 1961 inauguration:

Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need—not as a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, ‘rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation’—a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.

At the Democrats’ virtual national convention on the second night, the celebrity master of ceremonies, Tracee Ellis Ross, turned this on its head. Instead of a summons to the American people, she said that what America needs is a president responsive to those making demands on the government.

“Real leaders don’t ask what we can do for them. They ask what they can do for us,” Ross said.

That’s not the leadership Kennedy offered, but it is the leadership Democrats demand of us today.