[R-P] La Mistica Kennedy - Todo a Obi

[Ezequiel Beer]

* ¿Los Clinton sirven realmente la larga causa del Paritido Democrata or 
estan usando al partido como un vehiculo de uso personal ?

* El Refuerzo de los Kennedy ayudara sobre los los votantes de las clases 
trabajadoras




Op-Ed Columnist
The Kennedy Mystique



By DAVID BROOKS
Published: January 29, 2008
Something fundamental has shifted in the Democratic Party.


Last week there was the widespread revulsion at the Clintons' toxic attempts 
to ghettoize Barack Obama. In private and occasionally in public, leading 
Democrats lost patience with the hyperpartisan style of politics - the 
distortion of facts, the demonizing of foes, the secret admiration for 
brass-knuckle brawling and the ever-present assumption that it's necessary 
to pollute the public sphere to win. All the suppressed suspicions of 
Clintonian narcissism came back to the fore. Are these people really serving 
the larger cause of the Democratic Party, or are they using the party as a 
vehicle for themselves?
And then Monday, something equally astonishing happened. A throng of 
Kennedys came to the Bender Arena at American University in Washington to 
endorse Obama. Caroline Kennedy evoked her father. Senator Edward Kennedy's 
slightly hunched form carried with it the recent history of the Democratic 
Party.
The Kennedy endorsements will help among working-class Democrats, Catholics 
and the millions of Americans who have followed Caroline's path to maturity. 
Furthermore, here was Senator Kennedy, the consummate legislative craftsman, 
vouching for the fact that Obama is ready to be president on Day One.
But the event was striking for another reason, having to do with the 
confluence of themes and generations. The Kennedys and Obama hit the same 
contrasts again and again in their speeches: the high road versus the low 
road; inspiration versus calculation; future versus the past; and most of 
all, service versus selfishness.
"With Barack Obama, we will turn the page on the old politics of 
misrepresentation and distortion," Senator Kennedy declared. "With Barack 
Obama, there is a new national leader who has given America a different kind 
of campaign - a campaign not just about himself, but about all of us," he 
said.
The Clintons started this fight, and in his grand and graceful way, Kennedy 
returned the volley with added speed.
Kennedy went on to talk about the 1960s. But he didn't talk much about the 
late-60s, when Bill and Hillary came to political activism. He talked about 
the early-60s, and the idealism of the generation that had seen World War 
II, the idealism of the generation that marched in jacket and ties, the 
idealism of a generation whose activism was relatively unmarked by drug use 
and self-indulgence.
Then, in the speech's most striking passage, he set Bill Clinton afloat on 
the receding tide of memory. "There was another time," Kennedy said, "when 
another young candidate was running for president and challenging America to 
cross a New Frontier." But, he continued, another former Democratic 
president, Harry Truman, said he should have patience. He said he lacked 
experience. John Kennedy replied: "The world is changing. The old ways will 
not do!"
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. And he could do it because culture really does have rhythms. 
The respect for institutions that was prevalent during the early '60s is 
prevalent with the young again today. The earnest industriousness that was 
common then is back today. The awareness that we are not self-made 
individualists, free to be you and me, but emerge as parts of networks, webs 
and communities; that awareness is back again today.
Sept. 11th really did leave a residue - an unconsummated desire for 
sacrifice and service. The old Clintonian style of politics clashes with 
that desire. When Sidney Blumenthal expresses the Clinton creed by telling 
George Packer of The New Yorker, "It's not a question of transcending 
partisanship. It's a question of fulfilling it," that clashes with the 
desire as well.
It's not clear how far this altered public mood will carry Obama in this 
election. But there was something important and memorable about the way the 
75-year-old Kennedy communed and bonded with a rapturous crowd half a 
century his junior.
The old guy stole the show.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/29/opinion/29brooks.html?ref=opinion