Obama is creating a new kind of public service. (With a little help from Roosevelt and Kennedy.)

It’s clear that the Demeter Project won’t entail countrywide sacrifice, but it may entail countrywide service. Obama continues to speak about it as though it’s a national service initiative—something that all of America can unite behind. At this point it should come as no surprise: This tactic is actually a skillful blend of both FDR’s and JFK’s rhetoric.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was even more of a green nut than Obama. Rather than provide direct relief to the unemployed, he employed 3 million people in his Civilian Conservation Corps. The deal was simple: If you improve America’s natural reserves and its infrastructure to deal with natural catastrophes, the government will write you a paycheck. The parallels are plenty clear to Obama’s potential GreenCorps. But FDR’s CCC did not have any of the rallying-cry rhetoric that Obama’s Demeter Project employs. The CCC was a strictly utilitarian affair.

Contrast that with Kennedy’s Apollo Program. When Kennedy first threw his support behind the Apollo Program, he delivered a speech that talked about the big picture before the particulars.

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

The Apollo Program was a call to action for JFK in the same way that the Demeter Project is for Obama. Yes, later in the speech there was the usual boilerplate of promises to invest in the resources necessary to go to the moon. But the message was aimed more to shift mentalities than to silence critics.

Obama hasn’t delivered his definitive Demeter Project speech, but given his feeling toward the issue, it’s likely to be one of his first once he takes office. When he gives it, we’re likely to hear his vision of what public service means in a new century. The closest we’ve come to getting a preview was at a national service forum in September of this year. Obama was asked what “the obligations of citizenship in a democracy” were. His response is illustrative:

What has built this country is people sense, through voluntary associations, but also through public service in government, that we have commitments that extend beyond our immediate self-interest, that aren’t always motivated by profit, that aren’t simply short-term, that we’re thinking long-term, to the next generation. Every bit of progress that we’ve made historically is because of that kind of active citizenship. And as president, what I want to do is restore that sense of common mutual responsibility. And I think the American people are ready for it.

Obama’s right; we’re ready for it. Assuming he makes it worth our while.