The 48% or so who voted for JFK weren't all radicals.
Most Americans fall in the middle of the political spectrum. Republicans go too far Right, the middle votes for Dems. Dems go to far Left, the middle votes for Pubbies.
But the hardcore Right and the hardcore Left vote the Party line, or at least have Party line sentiments, year in and year out. It's roughly even at about 15% to 20% for both sides. At most, that's a partisan 40% of the population, with the middle 60% being the elephant in the living room.
That's the 60% that Dems can't just admit that a Dem dream is to have abortion on demand, guns banned worldwide, and Kyoto implemented...just as Pubbies can't tell that 60% that we're going to end public schools, social security, and nuke Iran.
Because 60+ percent of American voters are non-radical (neither Left nor Right), both major political Parties have to behave, listen, and not cause a stampede.
Former Senator Daschle missed that above axiom, to the detriment of his political career. So did Next Gingrinch. Both of those two powerful politicians, one Left and the other Right, lost elections on their home turf because of the 60+ percent of the American middle.
What the 60% middle wants is general harmony...enough so that the headlines and the nightly news don't go scaring them. Put another way, they want to work, play, and live their lives without thinking about politics. They've got real lives to live, and once you start intruding on their lives by letting political problems encroach into the daily world of the middle 60%, you are going to see a voting stampede that can knock the most entrenched, powerful politicians out of office (e.g. Tower, Nixon, Gore).
So the more press coverage and air time that judicial obstructionists get, the sooner you'll have a stampede against those problem-making politicians.
This could be anything from a slow boil like what knocked Southern Democrat segregationists out of office, or a quick lightening strike such as what knocked Republican opponents of the New Deal out of office.
Both major Parties have gotten burned over time by awakening the slumbering 60% of the American middle. And if you look closely and carefully, you will notice that the losing Party in each case was doing strikingly similar things (i.e. think about what the Republicans were doing in the Senate to block the New Deal, as well as what the Southern Democrats were doing in the Senate to block civil rights legislation).
Those common denominators may very well serve as a road map for who will lose in the future, too. So look carefully.
Keep in mind as well that Karl Rove knows all of the above full well, too. It's no accident that we've been deliberately picking fights with Senate Democrats (e.g. Bolton, Rice, Judges), and it shouldn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what behavior we are deliberately provoking from the Dems, and why.
The beauty of it is that the Dems are so emotionally driven that we know that they'll take the bait.