Virginia Postrel writes for Bloomberg that, 50 years after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, now is a good time for Democrats to call off their search for the mythical Camelot.

For 50 years, Americans of various persuasions have imagined their ideals embodied in a Camelot that might have been. Advocates of a vigorous Cold War foreign policy claim John Kennedy. So do their opposites. He did less for the civil-rights movement than his unglamorous successor, Lyndon Johnson, yet in imagination he would have done more. Above all, people imagine that somehow a living Kennedy would have prevented the tumult of the 1960s.

What they don’t imagine is what happens to real presidents who live to be re-elected. The downsides of their policies become apparent. Their dirty secrets come out. The public tires of them.

Thanks to his sudden, violent death, JFK is forever young and forever whatever his adoring fans imagine him to be. The scandals that would have come — the dangerously compulsive womanizing, the secret injections and medical coverups, the dirty tricks — are historic footnotes. The foreign-policy missteps and domestic political fights of a second term never happened.

For a half-century, Democrats have tried to recapture the magic of Camelot, and for a half-century, they have failed. They’ve mistakenly imagined that Camelot was about politics, culture or style. But, like all forms of glamour, Camelot was about imagination and desire. Glamour is a fragile illusion that, like humor, shatters with too much scrutiny.

The current president was, as a candidate, the most glamorous American politician since JFK. In 2008, Barack Obama was not just a young, handsome, slightly exotic figure with a beautiful family and a vision of change. He was the embodiment of his supporters’ deepest longings for their country and their president. He was, as a friend said during the campaign, “a kind of human Rorschach test.” Different people projected different, often contradictory ideals onto him, just as they did — and still do — onto Kennedy.

The realities of politics and policy have punctured Obama’s glamour. He has become yet another embattled second-term president. He hasn’t recaptured Camelot. And for that, all Americans, supporters and opponents alike, should be grateful. Camelot is a myth born from an assassin’s bullet and a widow’s image-making gifts. It never existed in real life. It was conjured only in death.

Postrel will address the John Locke Foundation’s Shaftesbury Society Monday, Dec. 2, on the topic “The Power of Glamour.”