Rubio is trying out Kennedy nostalgia on the campaign trail:

But it was a new line he began road-testing in Iowa that stood out. Rubio presented the 2016 campaign as a generational pivot point, likening his vision for a “New American Century”—the tagline of his campaign—to Kennedy’s 1960 challenge to the nation to embrace a “New Frontier.”

“This election isn’t about what laws we’re going to pass. It’s about what kind of country we’re going to be,” Rubio said to a packed Holiday Inn conference room. “And we’ve made that choice before. Asked six decades ago, this nation and that generation chose to embrace a New Frontier. In fact, they took up the challenge of a then young president who said, ‘Ask not what your country can do, ask what you can do for your country.'”

Rubio’s decision to link himself rhetorically to JFK and the New Frontier is weird in many respects, but it’s also quite revealing. It’s weird in that Kennedy is a wildly overrated president. His foreign policy record was largely one of failure, and the errors he made while president haunted the U.S. for decades afterwards. Americans did vote in Kennedy, more or less, but in retrospect that was a bad choice. Rubio wants to emphasize his youth and his foreign policy views as the reason why he should be president, but Kennedy’s presidency is a stark warning not to take a chance on an inexperienced hawkish senator. Inviting comparisons with Kennedy can’t possibly help Rubio, since he will either be found less impressive than Kennedy or he will draw attention to his own weaknesses as a candidate.

The references to Kennedy are revealing in that they confirm that Rubio remains locked into a view of the U.S. role in the world that hasn’t made sense since the Cold War ended. Rubio opened his speech at the Council on Foreign Relations with an extended quote from Kennedy’s final speech, which was intended to highlight the bipartisan heritage of the bad foreign policy thinking that Rubio was about to demonstrate. The New Frontier is saddled with the baggage of the disaster in Vietnam just as talk of a “new American century” is unavoidably linked with the Iraq war that its supporters championed, so it is fitting that Rubio would mention them together. While he may not be intending to do this, his invocations of Kennedy remind us that Rubio’s aggressive and ambitious foreign policy views, like Kennedy’s, are very dangerous and ought to be rejected.