WASHINGTON – Ten days before he died, John F. Kennedy met in the White House for several hours with his political advisers. The 1964 campaign was taking shape -- Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller were the leading Republican rivals -- and the president was worrying about what his party had to offer to average voters.
"What is it that we can do to make them decide that they want to vote for us, Democrats and Kennedy?" the president asked. "We hope we have to sell them prosperity, but for the average guy the prosperity is nil. He's not unprosperous, but he's not very prosperous ... And the people who really are well-off hate our guts ..."
That very conversation could be held in Barack Obama's White House. He's not running for re-election, but his Democrats face the voters in November's midterm congressional elections, and then his political heirs do so again in the presidential election two years hence.
The Democrats do have some advantages. Three of the four biggest states have growing Hispanic populations and the fourth, New York, seems permanently out of reach for the GOP. Mitt Romney took only a quarter of the Hispanic vote in 2012 and John McCain won only a third four years earlier.
But that is not to say the Democrats have smooth sailing ahead. They face several substantial problems in 2016:
-- The solidification of the Solid South.
The Republicans can count on the support of white voters who are as loyal to the GOP as black voters are to the Democrats. Though Obama will not be on the ballot in 2016, the Democrats speak a language white Southerners do not embrace.
-- Resentment over the state of the economy and lingering worries about Obamacare.
Several studies indicate the recovery from the Great Recession has been less robust than that of any post-war recovery, producing a job market more forbidding than that of previous recessions.
That notion was underscored by Fed Chair Janet Yellen, who in a speech this spring acknowledged, "the recovery still feels like a recession to many Americans, and it also looks that way in some economic statistics." She noted national unemployment is still higher than it ever got during the 2001 recession.
-- The Kennedy worry, applied to 2016: What can the Democrats do to make Americans vote for them, given the tepid economy?
A century ago, it was not unusual for parties to hold the presidency more than two consecutive terms; the Republicans did it for three between 1921 and 1933 and for four from 1897 to 1913, and the Democrats for five between 1933 and 1953. Since then, only once (from 1981 to 1993, through Ronald Reagan's two terms followed by George H.W. Bush's single term) has a party exceeded two terms.
The challenge former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton or any other Democrat faces in the next presidential election is that the party nominee will be portrayed as offering a reprise of the two Obama terms.
Shribman is editor of the Post-Gazette (dshribman@post-gazette.com).