Last night during the State of the Union address, Barack Obama sat next to liberal lion Ted Kennedy who had endorsed him earlier in the day. The seating arrangement highlighted the merger of Camelot and Obama, something that Mark Steyn has labeled Obamalot. Although the chatterers always pay a lot of attention to endorsements, I found the optics of Obama and Kennedy doing the political equivalent of cuddling during the State of the Union to be a little off. It somehow seemed wrong that Obama was rubbing his taut, lean elbow of the future with Ted Kennedy’s flabby elbow of the past. The Kennedy/Obama merger surely has energized a bunch of wheezing Baby Boom gasbags who never cease pining for a return to the glory days of their past. But precisely therein lies the problem. Obama is putting forth a new kind of politics, and yet is oddly wallowing in the imprimatur bestowed on him from one of the dinosaurs of the past. Obama preaches a politics of national unity, while there hasn’t been a more deliberately divisive political leader (not named Clinton) than Ted Kennedy over the past forty years. It reminds me a bit of Al Gore endorsing Howard Dean. Dean enjoyed considerable success in 2003 as the maverick running against the national party’s power structure. But when Gore endorsed him and Dean ate it up, it appeared that the party collective had absorbed the formerly independent rabble-rouser. Without exaggeration, Ted Kennedy’s style of liberalism was exhausted while Obama was still in high school. What’s more, Kennedy has always made a less-than-entirely reputable champion for his brand of politics. One of the exciting things about the Obama campaign is the way it offers hope that a new kind of politics might emerge. It’s hard to see how Obama benefits by embracing the worst of the old kind of politics that so much of the country is so eager to leave behind.
