I am stunned that Ted Kennedy has endorsed Obama over Hillary. Sishir, I agree much of it has to do with distaste for Hillary. In fact, looking back to when Obama was lagging in the polls over the summer yet money kept flowing to him tipped me off that dislike of Hillary was deep within the Dem party. Ted Kennedy doesn't do anything for me and he is an old political dinasour that I've strongly disliked for decades. But at least you can say his endorsement means something and it could have a profound effect on the nomination. He must have felt pretty strong about it.
The other thing about these endorsements depends on how much they are going to campaign for the candidates. Rumors are that Ted Kennedy will be campaigning out west as well in the NY/NJ/MA areas. These are real impacts going to Super Tuesday because the candidates can't be everywhere at once. Clinton has the advantage of the two-headed monster of Bill & Hillary - if these Obama endorsers are willing to go where they are most useful, that's a huge plus. If the popular governors can cover their own states, that's less time the candidates themselves need to spend in those places, etc. It will be interesting to see how many of these endorsements translate into campaigning as well.
That would require me "going back and forth" about Jack Kennedy and his accomplishments. I've already said I don't feel like it. I'll just end up getting upset with people I ordinarily like. If anyone else wants to, go ahead. Impeach Bush.
I'm sure BC has a fine appreciation for women, but in the final analysis, i doubt this endorsement means much.
Hey that is what D&D is for...I like you, but I'd go back and forth without changing that fact. In my view, JFK was in an era (along with FDR, and especially Truman) when the Democratic Presidents were at their best. Over the past 30 years, the platform and leadership has changed for the worst by majority very much so.
This guy makes me want to puke, I love how the dems are the party of "inclusion" but yet all they do is play the class warefare, race and gender cards.
Hey Ted let's talk about the big dig project or the woman you left dead without reporting you piece of crap
I'm going to copy and paste a post by B-Bob in another thread (something I don't ordinarily do) simply because it illustrates a significant part of why I was/am a fan of Jack Kennedy, and an even bigger supporter of his brother, Bobby. Hopefully with the indulgence of B-Bob. (Post below by B-Bob) I know, right? T_J talking race baiting and partisanship is almost performance art. If I'm a partisan, why would I consider McCain versus some democrats for my vote? I am looking forward to a time when W returns to meaning "whatever," just for threads like this. Anyway, I've seen no arguments to convince me that Obama cannot win over some conservatives. (In fact, according to many posters here, he is doing that empirically.) Nor have I seen an argument that persuades me that he is ineffective. I just don't see the substance to that claim. Great article last week on Hillary (&Obama tangentially), in the New Yorker Link: The Choice, by George Packer (first page only here) In the fall of 1971, a Yale Law School student named Greg Craig sublet his apartment, on Edgewood Avenue, in New Haven, to his classmate Hillary Rodham and her boyfriend, Bill Clinton, for seventy-five dollars a month. Over the following decades, Craig and the Clintons continued to cross paths. Craig, who became a partner at the blue-chip law firm Williams & Connolly, in Washington, D.C., received regular invitations to White House Christmas parties, where Hillary always remembered to ask about his five children. In the fall of 1998, President Clinton asked him to lead the defense team that the White House was assembling for the impeachment battle. On a bookshelf in Craig’s large corner office are several photographs of him with one or both Clintons, including a snapshot of the President and his lawyers—their arms folded victoriously across their chests—taken after Craig’s successful presentation during the Senate trial. An inscription reads, “To Greg. We struck the right pose—and you struck the right chords! Thanks—Bill Clinton, 2/99.” In spite of his long history with the Clintons, Craig is an adviser to Barack Obama’s campaign. “Ninety-five per cent of it is because of my enthusiasm for Obama,” he said last month, at his law office. “I really regard him as a fresh and exciting voice in American politics that has not been in my life since Robert Kennedy.” In 1968, Craig, who is sixty-two, was campaigning for Eugene McCarthy when he heard a Bobby Kennedy speech at the University of Nebraska, and became a believer on the spot. Since then, Craig has not been inspired by any American President. As for the prospect of another Clinton Presidency, he said, “I don’t discount the possibility of her being able to inspire me. But she hasn’t in the past, and Obama has.” Inspiration is an underexamined part of political life and Presidential leadership. In its lowest, most common form, inspiration is simple charisma that becomes magnified by the media, as with Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton. On rare occasions, however, a leader can become the object of an intensely personal, almost spiritual desire for cleansing, community, renewal—for what Hillary, in a 1969 commencement speech at Wellesley, called “more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living.” Somewhere between the merely great communicators and the secular saints are the exceptional politicians who, as Hillary put it then, “practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible possible.” Robert B. Reich, the Secretary of Labor in Clinton’s first term, who now teaches at Berkeley, told me that he believes political inspiration to be “the legitimizing of social movements and social change, the empowering of all sorts of people and groups to act as remarkable change agents.” Reich was once a close friend of both Clintons—he met Hillary when they were undergraduates, and began a Rhodes Scholarship the same year as Bill—but he has not endorsed a candidate, and he seems drawn to Obama, for the same reasons that attracted Craig. “Obama is to me very analogous to Robert Kennedy,” Reich said. “The closer you got to him, the more you realized that his magic lay in his effect on others rather than in any specific policies. But he became a very important vehicle. He got young people very excited. He was transformative in the sense of just who he was. And a few things he said about social justice licensed people. Obama does all that, almost effortlessly.” http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?t=141557&page=2 Impeach Bush.
I don't hear the GOP talking about it, tell me when and where you hear the GOP pitting class, race and gender against each other? I pissed at the GOP because they have been spending like crazy, STOP SPENDING MONEY
Minorities : Democrats :: Evangelicals : Republicans The party does a lot of pandering, delivers on very few promises, and generally takes their votes for granted. Then the party leaders get uncomfortable when a member of either group gets a real voice.
Sometimes they do subtly. The Democrats are much more overt about race, gender, and class politics. To be fair, Republicans can probably be accused of ignoring race, gender, and class issues.
A lot of pandering? Which political party committed political suicide in the South to get the Voting Rights Act passed? The GOP? Aside from a few brave members of Congress (Dirksen, for example) who couldn't find a place in today's Republican Party, and weren't hurt by their vote, I think not. There are many other examples of what the Democratic Party has done for minorities, but I really need to go to lunch. Impeach Bush.
I know what you're saying, but pro-business Republicans overwhelmingly supported the Voting Rights Act, while pro-labor Democrats did by a smaller margin. 1965 Voting Rights Act Vote Count Senate: 77–19 Democrats: 47–17 Republicans: 30–2 House: 333–85 Democrats: 221–61 Republicans: 112–24
The vote was when everyone knew LBJ had twisted enough arms to just get it passed. With the majority the Democratic Party had in Congress at that time, it was always about getting enough Southern Democrats to support the bill and get it passed. Some of those who voted for it may not have supported it (LBJ could be very persuasive), but it directly led to the downfall of the Democrats in the South. Don't think the GOP members of Congress didn't consider that when they voted. I still give them credit for their vote, however. Dirksen, in particular, was instrumental in helping LBJ round up the votes. Sadly, that Republican Party no longer exists. Most of the GOP members of Congress back then would be vilified by the GOP leadership of today. Impeach Bush.
While the headline from the big media is showing Ted Kennedy endorsing Obama, what's gone unnoticed is three prominent Robert Kennedy's children -- Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Bobby Kennedy Jr., and Mary Kerry Kennedy -- are backing Obama's rival Clinton.
Of course it's not being covered today - Bobby endorsed her in November and KKT earlier this month, not today. And KKT, at least, did it by conference call instead of at a big media event.
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