I wish we could.
Escape From Camelot
By Matt Bai
Primary Argument - Matt Bai - The Caucus - Politics - New York Times Blog
January 8, 2008, 12:16 pm
MANCHESTER, N.H. — It’s primary day here in New Hampshire. No more rallies, no more town halls, no more Ron Paul sign-holders standing in the middle of Elm Street. (Where do these people come from? And why do they think that’s working?) Unlike in Iowa, where you can actually go see the caucus process play out somewhere, primary day in New Hampshire means that we are mostly reduced to hanging around and awaiting the voters’ verdicts. Four years ago, I passed the afternoon playing pool with a couple of other journalists. This time, I might just stop by the mall.
With polls showing Barack Obama opening up a significant lead over his rivals, most of the unanswered questions today, barring a significant surprise, would seem to be on the Republican side. Either John McCain or Mitt Romney could pick up his first win here tonight. After those two, there’s an interesting and potentially consequential battle for third place between Mike Huckabee, Rudolph W. Giuliani and Ron Paul. I’ll have more to say about some of these candidates and the results from New Hampshire in the next few days.
For now, though, I’ll just remark briefly on a theme I’ve been hearing with more and more frequency at Democratic campaign events lately. Last week, in Council Bluffs, Iowa, after a late-night speech by John Edwards, I heard an older man tell his friend, “He’s Bobby Kennedy reborn, that’s what he is.” In Salem, N.H., a few days ago, a woman standing behind me, waiting to get into an Obama rally, said, “He’s just like Bobby Kennedy.” Another journalist at the rally, picking up on this idea, commented to me on the way Mr. Obama’s suit fits his wiry frame tightly and squared at the shoulders, so that his silhouette appears Kennedyesque. Earlier this week, an NBC.com blogger offered a lengthy comparison between the lives of Mr. Obama and Robert Kennedy.
Just yesterday, in fact, Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton got into a testy back-and-forth about whether Mr. Obama can fairly compare himself to John Kennedy when it comes to his relative inexperience. (As Clinton rightly pointed out, he really can’t, since Kennedy had racked up 14 years in the House and Senate by the time he was elected. Mr. Obama has been in Washington since 2005.)
I was born about three months after Robert Kennedy’s death, so I’ll probably never understand what it is about the Kennedy legend that seems to have suspended Democrats of a certain generation in a specific moment in time, as stuck in their frame of reference as an insect in amber. Every four years, it seems, since I first became aware of politics, Democrats have been trying to transform someone into a Kennedy, almost always with disappointing results. Sometimes it’s the candidate with “youthful vigor,” like a Gary Hart or a Bill Clinton. Other times it’s been the guy with stirring anti-war speeches (Howard Dean), or a sense of ideological purity (Bill Bradley), or even just the right hair and accent (John Kerry).
There’s something unhealthy about all this Baby-Boomer reminiscing, because it forces Democrats always to look backward, to serve some unrealized ideal of government rather than a more modern and relevant vision of what government might become. There is a faint line between nostalgia and delusion, and with each passing year, those liberals who long for the reincarnation of their heroes seem ever closer to obliterating it.
In Mr. Obama’s case, such comparisons are especially misguided (even when he himself is the one making them), because they would seem to contradict the very point of his campaign. Mr. Obama was born during John Kennedy’s presidency and was 6 years old when RFK was killed, and thus he is the first presidential candidate of our time who wasn’t shaped by assassination and war. (Mrs. Clinton was a college junior in 1968; Mr. Edwards was 15.) Mr. Obama’s essential argument is that it is time for both parties to get past the 1960s already and to recognize that the new century demands a different kind of debate than the one in which Boomers have engaged for the last 30 years. Whether or not he actually has the skill and experience necessary to dislodge us from the past is the real question surrounding his improbable campaign.
It seems to me that Mr. Obama should stay away from Kennedy allusions, and perhaps Democratic voters will follow suit. After all, you can’t really revive the era of Camelot and try to bury it at the same time.
Matt Bai, who covers politics for the Sunday Times Magazine, is the author of “The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics.” |
