Politics & Power Quote by Jackie Kennedy

It lands like a society aside with a stiletto heel: a political identity reduced to lived experience, and a conversion story told with patrician calm. Jackie Kennedy isn’t praising Democrats so much as she’s puncturing the idea that party loyalty is a moral posture. The line implies Republicanism is best understood as a kind of discomfort you have to outgrow - a training regimen that makes the alternative feel like relief.

The intent is double-edged. On the surface, it’s a wry endorsement of her husband’s party. Underneath, it’s a social observation about class, culture, and the mid-century establishment that produced both Kennedys and their rivals. In that world, being a Republican was often the default setting: the respectable, inherited affiliation of moneyed East Coast networks. To say you had to be one first suggests that Democratic identification, at least for elites, can be an earned sensibility rather than a birthright - a choice that signals openness, modernity, even a hint of rebellion.

The subtext also flatters the listener who’s made the switch: you’re not just a Democrat; you’re a Democrat with perspective. It’s a conversion narrative that doesn’t require policy detail because the emotional logic does the work. “Good” here isn’t ideological rigor; it’s the pleasure of release - the sense that you’ve moved from obligation to belonging.

Coming from a First Lady, the remark carries a special irony: she’s both inside politics and above it, using elegance and humor to make partisanship sound like taste.