“Kennedy had the good luck to govern at the time of peak power for America,” Larry Sabato explains in a phone interview from his office at the University of Virginia. “It was a troubled time in terms of civil rights and some other issues, but, by and large, it was a happy time. Things were moving in the right direction, and then the assassination, it was kind of a rebaptism by blood. Kennedy became a secular saint,” especially to the Democratic base, which has celebrated Kennedy at every convention since 1960.