Ted Kennedy is no model for Obama

Barack Obama’s moving eulogy for Ted Kennedy has invited comparisons between the two men. In the wave of Kennedy nostalgia that is sweeping the US, it is tempting to dub Obama the Kennedy of his generation. The two certainly share glamour, charisma and the devotion of their party. Arguably, it was Ted who put Obama in the White House by endorsing him in the 2008 Democratic primaries. Obama has returned the favour by adopting his legislative agenda and is now trying to force through Congress Ted’s vision for a national health insurance programme. Given the moral impetus that Kennedy’s passing will give the bill, he may yet succeed.

In sum, it is tempting to suggest that Obama’s ‘audacity of hope’ reflects a new commitment on the part of American liberals to the ambitions and style of the Kennedy era. If this is true — if Obama truly is trying to ape Camelot — then he could be making a terrible mistake. For the death of Edward Kennedy marks the end of a political era, not the beginning of a new one.

Ted Kennedy lived in the shadow of his brothers. This was tragic on a personal level, but it also produced an anachronistic politics that poorly reflected the real demands of its time. For a start, Jack and Bobby Kennedy were not the knights in shining armour that the Camelot myth suggests. Jack was a philanderer and was so wracked with disease that he lived on crutches. As a president he was markedly unsuccessful at getting his legislative agenda past Congress, in part because his vision of an activist American government was so divisive. It was only when he was assassinated in 1963 that his successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, was able emotionally to blackmail a strongly Democratic Congress into building a Great Society.