Throughout this primary, there's been very little I could bank on. Certainly not my preference in candidates. That changed with the tides. Not the preferences of my friends, or the voters. The candidates themselves shifted and shimmered and changed, and so did the campaigns they ran. But there was one thing I could count on: My grandmother did not like Barack Obama. Not one little bit. No sir.
Yesterday, she told me she voted for him....On some level, family members are the cab drivers of electoral politics, the folks media types turn to because they let us into their thinking, while the rest of the electorate remains stubbornly opaque. It's a crude stand-in, though, so take it with a grain of salt. But though the Caroline Kennedy endorsement meant nothing to me, it does seem to have mattered to generations above mine. It mattered to my grandmother, and my mother. A friend told me, yesterday, that he knew a woman who'd been a Hillary fundraiser, and flipped after Kennedy's stand: "It was like getting a permission slip to be idealistic again," she said. I didn't even read it closely. But one generation up, it seems to have mattered greatly...
Since news of the Kennedy endorsements broke over the weekend, I've been trying to figure out how I would explain their importance to my students. They all know who the Kennedys are, of course, but they don't really know. More importantly, I myself barely know. I was born in 1971, and most of what I learned about the Kennedys growing up was in the context of the Reagan-dominated 1980s. For me there's just now ay it can be personal.
But then, this: "It was like getting a permission slip to be idealistic again."
Although it is a cliche to say that the idealism of the 1960s died in Sixty Eight, it is also nevertheless true. And for those of us who came of age after that tumultuous year, we've spent most if not all of our lives living in its echo. In our earliest years, hope gave way to identity as the nation's primary motivating political force, with the politics of "me" replacing the politics of "we." Reagan was the perfect president for this new era, a man who believed that national greatness could only return if we rejected the collective and returned the individual to the center of the political stage. When Reagan proclaimed "government is not the solution to our problems," what was he doing if not announcing the death of the Great Society and the sixties-inspired dreams upon which it had been built?
Reagan may have thought he was ending the echo, but of course all he really did was amplify it. The rheotircal terrain might have shifted, but it was all part of the same war. By the end of his second term, however, you would have been forgiven if you failed to notice, because for a moment it seemed everything had changed. With the collapse of the iron curtain and the fall of the Berlin Wall, some even grew so bold as to suggest that we had reached the end of history itself. Wasn't it obvious?
But of course, it wasn't, as the Bill, Hillary, and George W. years would soon make clear. If there has ever been a more perfect example of how the promise of the Sixties "we" had morphed into the Eighties "me" I haven't seen it. It was the same language, the same images, and the same fights, all wrapped up in an economic frenzy that would have made Gordon Gecko proud. Get what you can, get it now, get it fast! Live for today, and to hell with the consequences!
All of which brings me back to Kennedy and Obama. For the first time in my lifetime we have a candidate who is promising a politics based on "we" and not "me." For those of us under 40, the era of JFK, RFK, MLK, and LBJ is all part of history, something we'll never know beyond what was recorded on film or with the written word. For us the comparisons between Kennedy and Obama sound great, of course, but they aren't personal, not in the way they would be for some of those who came in the generation before.
Now to be sure, there are of course plenty of people who lived the dream and then let it die, just as there are many, many more who who never saw reason to believe at all. But for others - including many who are of the same political generation as Bill and Hillary - the Kennedy name means something very real and very personal. And for some - how many? I don't know - the Kennedy endorsement will act not just as a "permission slip to be idealistic again," but also as a permission slip to believe that Obama might, just might, be for real.
The Kennedy endorsement might not mean much for those of us under 40, but Obama already had us, so who cares? Liberal, activist Baby Boomers are the heart of the Clinton coalition, and it will be to them that the Kennedy endorsement speaks. For some of them it will be personal. How many? We'll see. We'll see....
UPDATE: Shorter version from Sullivan:
I can't imagine it will buoy independents. But they're not the ones Obama needs right now.
And Ambinder:
It allows Obama to further clarify what, for him, the Old Politics is all about -- that is, it allows him to separate the Politics of the Clintons from the politics of Democrats before the Clinton administration -- a party dominated by the Kennedy dynasty and their patrons, in many respects. And the The New Kennedy is even more of an attractive figure, in some respects. He has never shirked the responsibility of Democrats to beat up Republicans, but throughout his career, he has demonstrated a long arm for compromise. Most recently, He worked with President Bush on No Child Left Behind and with Mitt Romney (whether Romney currently accepts it or not) on health care in Massachusetts.In some ways, there may be no member of the Democratic pantheon who better reflects the consensus-based, transformative and activist-oriented politics that Obama embraces.
And so Kennedy can be an enormously effective advocate for Obama because he understands, and, indeed, has practiced the New Politics...
On a more visceral level, Ted Kennedy's endorsing your opponent is probably as big of a rebuke as there is in the Democratic Party -- even bigger than South Carolina.
This is precisely what Reagan did when calling for a return to greatness. He hated LBJ and the Great Society, just as he had no love for Eisenhower and his caretaker, moderate Republicanism. But FDR was always among his favorite presidents, an example for him of what politics could and should be again. And Reagan wasn't alone - this is precisely the path that restorative/realignment leaders always take.
UPDATE II: Here's the full text of the speech. And here's extensive analysis from Steve Benen.
And wow, read this from John Cole:
Well, Ted Kennedy just gave one hell of a speech endorsing Obama, and if Obama does go on to win it all, I think you can trace a lot of the momentum back to what happened today. I had it playing in the background, and I had to stop grading and pay full attention.Not to go all tweety on you, but you could really feel the importance of the occasion. Clinton needs to do something, have some sort of magic this week, or her comfortable control of the lead could begin to slip away. It felt that big, watching that event today.
UPDATE III: And Obama's response. Hey TPM - how about some edited video?
UPDATE IV: More from WaPo:
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