Why the Kennedys Are Endorsing Obama

Senator Edward Kennedy has decided to endorse Barack Obama for President, saying he wants a President who "can make us believe again." Over the weekend John F. Kennedy's daughter, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, announced her support for Obama, saying he reminded her of her father. Kennedy's speech writer Ted Sorenson asked what he could do for Obama last year, hoping no doubt that after the election Obama will ask what he can do for Sorenson. Like Kennedy, Obama is young, handsome and inspiring and he represents the passing of the torch to a new generation. But it is not just that Obama reminds them of Kennedy, it is also that the Clintons remind them of Lyndon Johnson. And if there is anything that the Kennedys don't like, it's a bunch of hillbillies in the White House, which is being kept in trust until a competent Kennedy can be groomed to take it back for its rightful owners. Until that time Obama will do.

Like Johnson, the Clintons play politics like it was mud wrestling or the roller derby, while the Kennedys have always believed that politics should be like a friendly game of touch football or beanbag. They never had to get down in the dirt with their opponents. Their father and his friends always took care of that for them.

When Hillary Clinton pointed out that it took Lyndon Johnson to get the Civil Rights bill passed, she was not only insulting Martin Luther King but also JFK, who did all the hard work of asking southern Democrats very politely to please vote for the Civil Rights bill, which they might have done some time in future as soon as they looked into their consciences and realized it was the right thing to do. Then Kennedy died and Johnson stepped in, rudely cajoling people and threatening to show them his scar unless they voted for it. Is that the kind of politics we want in America? Of course, if Kennedy had lived he also would have awakened one day and realized, unlike Johnson, that all of his advisers were not the best and the brightest but were really a bunch of dopes and he would have stood up to them and got us out of Vietnam.

In 1968 Robert Kennedy tried to take the White House back from the dumb hick who had taken it over by a fluke of history, but he was killed, too, before he got the chance. Ted Kennedy tried to save the country from another country bumpkin who got the keys to their house in 1980, but he lost to Jimmy Carter in the primaries. At first the Kennedys let Bill Clinton burnish their image by showing the photo of how he was somehow able to sneak his way into the White House to shake President Kennedy's hand when he was a young man. Now the Kennedys are saying enough is enough.

No one loved the Kennedys and hated Johnson more than liberals and the liberal media and they feel the same way about the Clintons. "Is the right right on the Clintons?" liberal pundit Jonathan Chait asks in an article in the Los Angeles Times. For years conservatives have been saying that the Clintons give politics a bad name. We look back with nostalgia to a time when gentlemanly Democrats like Michael Dukakis, Walter Mondale, George McGovern and Hubert Humphrey lost elections with grace and dignity. They didn't go around smearing their opponents and cynically triangulating the way the Clintons do. Now many liberals and members of the liberal media are coming around to thinking we've been right all along.

Although Republicans do not love the Kennedys the way liberals do, we hate Johnson and the Clintons more. Like many northeastern liberals we hate the way Johnson and the Clintons seem to believe unfairly that Americans are a bunch of racists. Unlike Johnson and the Clintons, Republicans are completely colorblind and never think of race at all. After the Civil Rights bill passed many southern Democrats were so tired of the way Johnson crudely and repeatedly flashed the Race Card that they became Republicans. President Nixon never mentioned race at all in his battles against busing and crime. President Reagan, who paid silent tribute to three Civil Rights workers who were killed in Philadelphia, Mississippi, when he launched his campaign there, never used the Race Card either when he fought against Welfare Queens and quotas. The first President Bush loved black people except when they were criminals like Willie Horton and his son appointed black people like Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice to his cabinet and felt really bad about all the black people who died in New Orleans.

And you don't see divisive racial battles in the Republican primary. None of the candidates has even mentioned the fact that Alan Keyes is black. When Rudy Giuliani was mayor of New York he lowered crime, which disproportionately affects black people, by giving more power to the police and ended all the racial divisiveness that erupted during the previous black mayor's term. Mitt Romney feels really comfortable around black people probably because his father marched with Martin Luther King, which affected his son so much that he imagined he was there, and how he did cry tears of joy when the Mormon Church announced that black people were no longer considered evil and his maid wouldn't have to go to hell after all. Governor Mike Huckabee stood up for the rights of all the people of South Carolina, black, white, brown, yellow and green, not to be told by white northern elites that they can't have the Confederate flag flying on their state buildings, which is a historical symbol of their unique culture going all the way back to 1962. And all the Republican candidates have fought very hard for the rights of African-Americans not to have their low-paying jobs taken away by illegal immigrants.

Conservatives are really appalled at the way the Clintons are injecting race into this campaign. In a piece in Red State called "Democrats: The Party of the Klan?" Eric Erickson writes, "They are always claiming that Republicans are racist, but it is looking more and more like the Democratic Party, to its core foundation, is racist." In South Carolina the Clintons threw everything at Obama they could think of except pointing out that he fathered a black child. Republicans are offended by such down-and-dirty politics, which reminds them of the time they had to employ Lee Atwater to counter all the dirt the Democrats were putting out, which even Atwater himself regretted as soon as he was dying. His protégée Karl Rove no doubt was also troubled by all the dirty politics that erupted in campaigns he was involved with, which could never be traced back to him since he had nothing to do with it at all.

Many conservatives are saying nice things about Barack Obama, even though he is liberal and black, which they probably don't even realize, because they long for the days before the Clintons ruined politics. "I tell you, he almost had me tonight until he talked about the war that shouldn't have been authorized and reminded me there are real policy issues at stake in this election!" gushed Kathryn Jean Lopez in The Corner. "But listening to his inspirational, rallying speech tonight it's clear and obvious that if he's the nominee, he will be tough to beat." Andrew Sullivan, who makes no secret of his hatred for the Clintons, has endorsed Obama. Unlike the Clintons and many white Democrats, they don't see him as the black candidate. Almost 25% of white voters voted for Obama in the South Carolina primary and if he is nominated he may even get a few white votes in the general election, though probably not enough to win. That's because race is no longer an issue for voters in the South and it really is rude of the Clintons to subtly imply that it is, if that's what they were doing and we know it was because the media has constantly pointed it out.

I think everyone is tired of the kind of politics the Clintons represent, which sees voters as easily manipulated racist dupes and does not appeal to the better angels of their nature the way Barack Obama does. Conservatives are really hoping that the Democrats nominate Obama because he gives us a chance to heal the wounds that the mean-spirited Clintons have inflicted on the body politic. Conservatives would relish the chance to debate about ideas again. I can assure you that I and my fellow conservative bloggers and pundits will not go digging around for mud to throw at him. We won't spread rumors that he's a Muslim or bring up past drug use or go looking through his books Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope for contradictions we can exploit.

That was the old kind of politics, which is entirely the fault of the Clintons. We want to transcend that. I agree with Bob Kerrey that it is great that Obama went to a madrassa and I think Hussein is a very nice middle name. I think it's about time we had a President who admits to using cocaine in the past so that he can tell our youth from experience how bad it is. Conservatives can all get behind a man who talks so movingly about faith even if his church does have some wacky ideas about white people being devils and it once honored Louis Farrakhan. And I think we'll all forget that he is black and best buddies with Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. If the Democrats nominate Obama conservatives will relish the chance to talk about issues and make the election as he says not "about black and white but about the past and future." Who couldn't be stirred by that kind of rhetoric?

Of course, we won't vote for Obama in the general election but that will only be because he is a tax-and-spend liberal who wants to surrender in Iraq, is against executing murderers and wants to impose gay marriage on everyone. In other words, we will just point out that we have a few policy differences with him. We relish the chance to debate the nuances of Obama's policy proposals and we'll be relieved not to have to drill into the heads of voters simplistic demeaning labels the way we had to do when we constantly referred to John Kerry as a flip-flopper and Al Gore as a phony. And the media will be happy not to have to repeat these charges in every story they write, which must have gotten kind of boring for them. Instead, they will be able to write the kinds of long thought pieces about issues that matter to people, which is what journalists really want to do. Conservatives will be so grateful to actually be able to finally debate the issues in a civil manner that we won't even mention all the other troubling stuff about Obama. You can trust us.

Update: It appears I have scooped the mainstream media if The Washington Post's Mary Ann Akers is correct about the reason Kennedy endorsed Obama.

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