.SOU DON'TMIND A Y (HAP PAN' c a r t e COSMETICCARE M A r t 'U p \ CONSULTAVION, DO i Fo(2 BRUNCH!^ yA ,2 (p?? PUSH we FAKC, you RAFE N J GuS^ AI26TH' „ BEST INTH B U S IN M # A . .-GA^tY WORTH TH' I SO GRAND !! 6 . — M X W IN N E R . /hR .BARROA /'-^ THEVtC 4OV£ V . .AM I T j y man of achi wement, the respected chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the leading advocate of national health insurance, willing, as he has said, “to sail against the wind” of conventional wisdom. Doherty and Wagner, so different from each other, yet alike in the tasks they perform for Kennedy, span his career. When Ted Kennedy first ran for the Senate he was inexperienced, living in the shadow of his brothers, and 30 years old. His campaign was managed by Stephen Smith, the Kennedy family executive. In the beginning, Ted was an image without depth, a Kennedy to be sure, but an extension of his family. He was another test case for exercising the Kennedy organization. His was the most lavish campaign ever seep in the state. This occurred, it should be recalled, before the era of campaign spending limits. Ted shelled out $225,000 to an advertising agency, then an unheard-of sum. Numerous films and videotapes were produced and aired on television, including one called Coffee with the Kennedys, about the Kennedy women’s famous coffee klatches. “Give Teddy a job, elect him to the Senate,” joked JFK. Ted’s opponent for the Democratic nomination was Edward McCormack, the attorney general of Massachusetts and scion of another distinguished Boston Irish political family. He was the nephew of House Speaker John W. McCormack. He invited Kennedy to debate him at South Boston High School. At the dramatic encounter McCormack pointed a finger at Kennedy and exclaimed that he had never worked a day in his life. “ If his name was Edward Moore, with his qualifications,” McCormack said, turning to Ted, “your candidacy would be a joke, but nobody’s laughing because his name is not Edward Moore. It’s Edward Moore Kennedy.” The next morning, bright and early, Ted and his aides were at a factory gate to shake the hands of the workers going in one the day shift. James King, Kennedy’s advance man, tells the story: “ ‘Hey Kennedy,’ yelled a worker, ‘I hear you never'worked a day in your life.’ Kennedy tightened. ‘Well,’ said the worker, ‘I want to tell you something. You haven’t missed a fucking thing.’ I was jumping up and down. ‘We won. We won,’ I shouted. You didn’t need the polls to know that.” Once in the Senate, Kennedy had the perspicacity to introduce himself politely to arch-troglodyte James Eastland of Mississippi, a pillar of the Senate establishment. Kennedy observed that institution’s peculiar folkways while compiling the most liberal record. After 17 years, there he is, a powerful figure with many palpable accomplishments. He is not the same Ted Kennedy who entered the Senate as the kid brother of the president. This Kennedy is not merely a candidate of promise. He has a record. He comes to the race as something of an elder statesman. Jimmy Carter’s collapse sets the agenda for Kennedy. Just as Richard Nixon’s depravity created a demand by the public for honest outsiders, antipoliticians of the Carter variety, so does Carter’s inability to lead create a demand for strong leadership, which Kennedy can provide. But leadership, the watchword of the 1980 election, is a reaction to Carter, not a positive theme in itself. For, once Kennedy is elected, leadership is no longer an issue. Where and how he leads is the issue. Carter may have needed leadership qualities to save him, but Kennedy needs a political milieu in which the politics of raised expectation don’t get out of hand. He needs the left: to pressure liberals to back him, and he needs the right, an ominous threat on the horizon. He also needs to address the pressing problems that created the expectations in the first place. If Kennedy doesn’t fulfill expectations, the dream may disintegrate into , its raw elements—fear, fatalism, insecurity—which the right can then reassemble. The last time the Kennedy dream exploded, one result was Richard Nixon. Rightists see Kennedy as a terrifying specter, a leftist with a highly efficient and effective political operation, the worst of all possible candidates. He represents the apocalypse, the end of the world. To the New Right, Kennedy’s presidential intentions are received as a declaration of war. “ It’s ideological warfare,’ says Richard Viguerie, direct-mail tyro of the New Right who works for GOP hopeful John Connally. “With a Kennedy administration we might wake up and there’d be no bailgame. Kennedy might be aggressive in trying to put the New Right out of business. The conservatives are moving along and then they start changing the rules on us. Kennedy is tough and the people around him play real hardball. We might not be able to operate. The real danger comes from the left. They will stifle all freedom. Kennedy’s committed to socialism. He will be a disaster. It’s important to stop him.” Richard Parker, the leftist political consultant, believes that Kennedy needs the left to meet expectations. “ In order to function he needs pressure from the left to fulfill his liberal agenda,” says Parker. “With no pressure there’s no room for him to maneuver. He also needs the left because the left, with all its faults, is the only source of dreams. Without the crude dreams of equality and justice, Kennedy has nowhere from which to draw a dream of his own.” In the Kennedy candidacy, dreams of the past and future mingle. “For in every sense,” writes Freud ill The Interpretation o f Dreams, “a dream has its origin in the past. The ancient belief that dreams reveal the future is not indeed entirely devoid of truth. By representing a wish as fulfilled, the dream certainly leads us into the future.” Kennedy’s goal may well have to be the creation of a politics in which he does not become a prisoner of the dream of which he is the symbol. If he fails, the unfulfilled past will haunt him. Reprinted by permission of The Real Paper. 23
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