It was the Kennedys, too, who created the office-holding family as glamorous celebrities and established the country's long fascination with the Kennedy children, first seen playing under their father's desk and then standing mute at his graveside. It was the drive of Robert and Edward Kennedy, and later some of their children, to follow Jack into the electoral arena, that made the whole idea of a political dynasty safe for public consumption. In that sense, Hillary, George, Al and Liddy are all Jack Kennedy's children. If there is one major generation gap between today's political sons and daughters and their parents, it is the shift in power from those old smoke-filled room to the corporate conference room. In 1960, Mayor Daley, the father, could deliver to JFK, the father, the presidential nomination and the White House through the power of his Chicago patronage machine.
Patronage still matters, but the patronage that matters today is the campaign contribution.
Mayor Daley, the son, spends the kind of time hobnobbing with Chicago bankers that Mayor Daley, the father, spent with neighborhood precinct captains. JFK Jr's grandfather, Joseph Kennedy, was a bare-knuckle millionaire, but I doubt that in his wildest imaginings he could conceive of a country in which Bill Gates alone controls as much personal wealth as the bottom 40 percent of the population. The great irony is that the dynastic politics of this summer turn upside-down what the Kennedy name once seemed to promise. The shift from candidates representing issues and constituencies to political brand names advertised like aspirin or automobiles narrows political engagement and puts power even more nakedly into the hands of wealthy donors and media brokers. Brand-name politics makes more distant the promise that many of those who mourn JFK Jr. this week once heard in his father's oratory on civil rights and economic justice, and later in the passion of Robert Kennedy's final crusades.