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At the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, Massachusetts, speeches made by the then-young president are replayed over and over again amidst replicated sets of places he once inhabited: the Oval Office, the Inaugural stage of the U.S. Capitol, the studios for the nation’s first televised presidential election debates. This is good, because Kennedy is hypnotic, and the fascination is not due merely to his looks.

In an interview conducted when he was a senator, the former journalist delivers a three-minute answer with an articulateness and acumen that unnerves audiences accustomed to teleprompter-assisted eloquence. When he is reading from text, the words are cogent, mellifluous, and I can’t help but write them down. Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. No focus group could have come up with a more perfect politician than Jack Kennedy.

How then, with such precedence, does one explain George W. Bush?

Chads and ballots aside, the issue here is an elusive but vital one: it is gravitas. Al Gore sometimes had it, most noticeably when he acceded the presidency to his opponent, but Bush Junior does not, even when he is presiding over the gravest of matters. Kennedy embodied it whatever the situation, be it the chilly morning of Inauguration Day, or amidst the monastic wooden chairs decorating his televised debate with rival Richard Nixon. He needed no props, no light-boxes, no soft-focus lenses. Rather, he liked the cameras to trail his steps; he was the first president to allow a filmmaker almost free rein in the West Wing.

Critics of Kennedy complain that his presidency — embellished with a glamorous wife with a penchant for haute couture, and an equally glamorous family that was fast becoming America’s version of the royal Windsors — was more style than substance. Yet compared to the spin-doctored candidates of today, the Kennedy on display at this library was refreshingly free of artifice.

These days, gravitas is often mocked. Lighten up, friends say to one another. Digress too much in “intellectual talk” and one risks being dismissed as a “liberal.” When Kennedy launched the Peace Corps program in 1961, he envisioned a generation imbued with a sense of purpose and duty to make the world a better place. Today, Peace Corps volunteers are snickered at as bleeding-heart do-gooders.

Kennedy said that if he hadn’t entered politics, he would have become an academic, because he liked to write. Perhaps if he lived amidst the cynics of society now, he would have little other choice but academia.

But that would be letting the cynics win. Quite a few people will not let this happen. People like Minnesota state Senator Mee Moua, who, at 33, is the first Hmong American elected to state office. Like thousands of other Hmong refugees from Laos following the war in Vietnam, Moua could not read or write when she arrived in the United States, because the Hmong did not have a written language. Now, Moua talks all the time, mostly about affecting change. Change in how we treat minorities, how we help the poor, how we empower our citizens. Like Kennedy, Moua believes in duty, in public service.

So does Carlos Tortolero, executive director of the Mexican Fine Arts Museum in Chicago. Tortolero isn’t a politician, but he would be a good one. He certainly embodies the commitment to change and the tireless energy that good politicians have.

Is it a coincidence that Moua and Tortolero are both immigrants? Perhaps immigrants are spared the jaundiced view of politics that now permeates the mainstream. Or perhaps my judgement is harsh. After all, a country that can elect a professional wrestler as a governor must still uphold a belief in public service and political participation.

Then there is The West Wing — the television show, not the actual place. Its popularity must be a testament to something, anything but the reality of low voter turnouts in national and local elections. Other people must watch it for the same reason I do: to feel the promise that America offers.

Kennedy saw the promise, and acted. Will others act too?