The Kennedy Endorsement
(John P. Filo/CBS)
The midday Washington rally at which Ted, Caroline, and Patrick Kennedy endorsed Barack Obama may or may not have enough political weight to change the outcome of the primaries. What it definitely did have was a huge supply of political irony.
First, the candidate whose entire campaign is premised on the need to “turn the page,” who defines the contest as one “between the past and the future,” received the blessing of the political figure most solidly identified with a storied past. Ted Kennedy was elected to the United States Senate in 1962, when Barack Obama was 15 months old. He remains, after 45 years in the Senate, the “last liberal lion,” the embodiment of a kind of Democrat anchored in a New Deal-Fair Deal-New Frontier-Great society era. For those of us of a certain age, our strongest memories of Caroline come from the magazine photographs of her dancing in the Oval Office, while her father clapped his hands … or more likely, from the black-and-white photos of her at her father’s funeral.
For a lot more Americans, there’s another iconic image – the grainy home movie footage of a teenaged Bill Clinton reaching out to shake the hand of President Kennedy at a Boys’ Nation gathering in the early 60s. Back in 1992, the Clinton campaign showcased that image as a way to argue that the torch had been passed to another young, vigorous Democrat. And those pictures of the Clintons sailing with the Kennedys off Cape Cod during his Presidency were not exactly accidents.
