It all boils down to this:
Abortion.
You look at Roe v. Wade and it is downhill from there.
Kennedy was the last real strong Democrat in office for them.
Today he'd be a Republican:
Catholic
Pro-Life
Anti-Tax (Past a tax cut)
Anti-Communist
Hawkish
Free-Enterpriser
I'm not sure what his stand on guns was, but that's not really the point.
The central problem of the D party is their coalition has fallen apart.
You can't be pro-environment and pro-union
You can't be pro-choice and strong on family values
You can't be pro-gay and strong on family values
You can't defend pornographers (liberal interpretation of the 1st amendment) and anti-gun (strict interpretation on the definition of 'militia' in the second)
You can't spend other people's money to improve the lot of the poor if it decreases the competitiveness of American labor.
You can't pay for the right of women to choose with the life of an innocent child - especially when the alternative is 9 months and their signature on an adoption waiver.
Abortion is the ultimate rejection of personal responsibility for their actions.
Women want control over their body, but only after having first relinquished that control by having sex.
You can't be the party of family values and somehow dodge biblical verses such as "I knew you from before you were formed in the womb"
They have to start there. Then they have to call homosexuality what it is - something in need of a cure. Don't spend billions on AIDS and nothing on what causes people to be gay. Eradicate homosexuality and you eliminate the most pernicious vector of that disease.
In Africa, it's nearly too late. Damage is done. Ironically, abstinence is their only cure, and it isn't going to happen. Simply too much to ask of a person.
Abortion is key. They keep clinging to that, and its going to continue to pull them down.
Every woman in their heart of hearts knows that you can't rub your stomach, swollen with child, and think of it as both a non-viable tissue mass and your baby in the same honest moment. Impossible.
Abortion is not defensible. It is their central vulnerability. It is the reason why they MUST remain godless. They can't call upon Him for victory, and kill 40 million kids at the same time.
The longer they cling to it, the more it will drag them down.
Here's my prediction - with RU486 out, Democrats will lead the charge to overturn Roe v. Wade.
They will steal the issue from Republicans, in a bid to reclaim the high moral ground.
They will also repudiate homosexuals within the next four years.
Moderates will start wafting back, and then it will be anybody's guess what will happen next.
I know this sounds implausible, but only Nixon could go to China. Only the Democrats could repeal Roe v. Wade and leave the gays behind.
If guns killed them in 1996, gay marriage killed them in 2004. 2006 will be the straw that breaks the camel's back. They'll lose another 5 to 8 senate seats.
JFK was a life member of the NRA
I've been telling people for years that JFKennedy was the first Reagan Republican (even before Rush said it on his show). The problem is, most of these people either were too young to remember, studied history in public (yech!) schools or are just plain blinded by party loyalty. (Actual quote from my grandmother "...I'm a Catholic first, a Democrat second, and an American third." This was just before she feigned a heart attack to try to keep me from enlisting in the Army in 1968.)
You just can't reason with people like these!
It was the same as with the other important issues.
He was either for them or against them.
That's the point.