Obama's Playlist Proves It: When It Comes to Coolness, He's Second Only to Kennedy

You can argue about his Mideast policy or failure with gun reform, but Obama's new playlist cements his cultural legacy as one of America's coolest presidents.

Perhaps it’s the latest polls that are finally showing a growing gap in favor of the Democratic candidate for president of the United States, or perhaps it’s just natural weariness at the end of eight years, but there seems to be a strong feeling of "the end of the road" these days in Barack Obama’s White House.

After John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960, several pundits noted that Kennedy was the first president who had not only begun to influence popular culture, but had been born into a generation that was already influenced by that same culture. While some Hollywood stars may have been inspired by the young president, by almost the same token, Kennedy and his advisers deliberately fashioned his public persona after the heroes of his favorite films.

The cultural preferences of the presidents who came afterward were widely documented by the media. Richard Nixon, for example, was an obsessive fan of the movie “Patton,” about the famous World War II general, and he would watch it repeatedly in the White House screening room even as the Watergate scandal began to evolve. And the strange encounter between Nixon and iconic singer Elvis Presley, who wanted the president to enlist him as a special agent in the war against drugs, was recalled in a movie just this past year.