Mary Jo Kopechne was unavailable for comment
Camelot died a long time ago.”
***
When I watched the Kennedy dynasty’s self-indulgent endorsement of Barack Obama yesterday, I saw a bloated, effete patriarch patting himself on the back and his candidate on the head. I heard empty platitudes and nostalgia and a desperate, windy plea for relevance. The hypocrisy of vicious, country-clubber Teddy K (Flashback: Teddy K and The Owl Club; Flashback;Teddy K’s unhinged diatribe against Sam Alito; Flashback: Kennedy’s shamnesty “Gestapo” rant) extolling Obama for “lifting up” rather than “tearing down” was nauseating.
New York Times conservative David Brooks, on the other hand, was enthralled by the “Kennedy mystique.” There was, gushed Brooks, “something important and memorable about the way the 75-year-old Kennedy communed and bonded with a rapturous crowd half a century his junior.”
Get him a drool bucket, stat:
The audience at American University roared. It was mostly young people, and to them, the Clintons are as old as the Trumans were in 1960. And in the students’ rapture for Kennedy’s message, you began to see the folding over of generations, the service generation of John and Robert Kennedy united with the service generation of the One Campaign. The grandparents and children united against the parents.
How could the septuagenarian Kennedy cast the younger Clintons into the past? He could do it because he evoked the New Frontier, which again seems fresh. He could do it because he himself has come to live a life of service.
After his callow youth, Kennedy came to realize that life would not give him the chance to be president. But life did ask him to be a senator, and he has embraced that role and served that institution with more distinction than anyone else now living — as any of his colleagues, Republican or Democrat, will tell you.
“Callow?”
“A life of service?”
Lee ADDS: ‘Fat Boy’ Kennedy’s attempts to deify Obama was a sight to behold! I wonder, as the two sat together for the State of The Union speech, did ‘Fat Boys’ hand stray?
