ETTYSBURG, Pa. - Our election expectations weren't born yesterday. They were born 40 years ago.
Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, spending increasing amounts of time at his Pennsylvania farm. His vice president, Richard M. Nixon of California, was running to succeed him. A charismatic lawmaker, Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, was challenging the Eisenhower legacy and urging Americans to ''get this country moving again.''
Nixon and Kennedy were young, modern, and innovative. In 1960 they invented a style of politics that, remarkably, still affects our politics four decades later.
Because when we think of presidential nomination struggles, the first modern primary that comes to mind is the 1960 contest in West Virginia, where Kennedy defeated Senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota and put to rest the notion that a Catholic candidate couldn't win Protestant votes.
When we think of national convention acceptance speeches, we think of Kennedy's ''New Frontier.'' When we think of presidential debates, we think of Kennedy and Nixon, pioneers in an art form that has become a staple of American presidential elections. And when we think of inaugural addresses, we think of Kennedy's challenge to Americans to ask what they could do for their country. No single sentence from any inaugural address since then has been so widely admired, or so widely quoted.
A new generation of political leaders, political reporters, and commentators has come of age since 1960, and yet the echoes of that campaign remain stronger, the lessons of that campaign remain more resilient, the impact of that campaign remains more significant than any since then. The 1960 campaign invented modern American politics, shaped our expectations of politics, shaped our views of postwar presidential leadership.
It is, of course, possible to argue that the election of 1968 more intimately involved issues of war and peace. But the conflict that dominated that election, Vietnam, was born of the 1960 election and Kennedy's determination, expressed on a cold day in January 1961, to pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty. It is possible to argue that the election of 1980, when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter, provided a clearer turning point in Americans' views about the size and reach of government, but the big growth in federal power was put in motion by Lyndon B. Johnson, who would never have been president but for the 1960 election and the assassination of Kennedy three Novembers later.
The Kennedy model has affected politicians since the night before the 1960 election, when every last Massachusetts politician crowded into the Boston Garden to witness Kennedy's homecoming and final appeal. They believed in their hearts, for this is the legend, that their senator had discovered some deep political secret and that they could be standing there as their party's presidential nominee if only they could figure out what it was. Bill Clinton studied Kennedy's appeal and style. Al Gore wrote his Harvard thesis on Kennedy's use of television.
And today two presidential nominees - both young in the Kennedy way, with one, Bush, inexperienced in the Kennedy way, and the other, Gore, experienced in the Nixon way - are leaving so many Americans cold in part because they do not appeal to them in the way Kennedy and Nixon did. When veteran newsman Paul Duke reexamines ''The Great Campaign of 1960'' on PBS Monday night, viewers will see a presidential election that was vital and exciting.
Why does the 1960 campaign tug at us still? Because it provided the basis for evaluating all subsequent campaigns.
Historians say that one of the reasons Franklin D. Roosevelt is such a vivid figure in US history is that he defined Americans' view of what a president was like, and he did it in such an enduring way that the presidents who followed were judged against that standard. (FDR's 1932 presidential election didn't do it; it was his administration that did.) In the same way, the 1960 election, taken broadly from the primary season through Kennedy's inauguration, defined Americans' view of what a campaign was like, and every one that followed has been judged against that standard. That is why the 2000 election seems so deficient. We knew Jack Kennedy and Dick Nixon. Al Gore and George Bush are no Kennedy and Nixon.
But campaigns are overtures and presidencies are operas. There's still the chance that President Gore or President Bush might reveal a virtuoso's touch once in the White House. On the campaign trail, however, they've fallen flat.
