TED KENNEDY PREPARES TO PASS THE MANTLE TO OBAMA...

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Mon Jan-28-08 11:08 AM
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TED KENNEDY PREPARES TO PASS THE MANTLE TO OBAMA...

TED KENNEDY PREPARES TO PASS THE MANTLE TO OBAMA...

Conservatives love to hate Ted Kennedy, and for good reason. He's the most powerful player on domestic issues in the U.S. Senate, a stalwart liberal with close ties to organized labor and minority groups that are the backbone of the Democratic party and a living link to the most iconic president of the post-World War II era.

He's also a prodigious and popular campaigner who gives a lot more than his good name to the candidates he chooses to support.

In states such as Iowa, New Hampshire and Wisconsin in 2004, Kennedy gave an essential boost to the presidential campaign of John Kerry. The senior senator from Massachusetts lent liberal credibility to the junior senator from that state, while at the same time cloaking a candidate who never quite fit into his "JFK" initials in some genuine Kennedy star power.

Barack Obama is not so in need of celebrity assistance as was the charisma-challenged Kerry. But, as Obama takes his campaign on the road to "Super Tuesday" states such as California and New York, Obama will be making the Kennedy connection.

The Democratic presidential candidate who won a landslide victory in South Carolina Saturday got a taste of Camelot Sunday, when Caroline Kennedy indicated that she saw something of her father, former President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, in the young senator from Illinois. In a New York Times column titled, "A President Like My Father," the daughter of the most iconic post-war Democratic president wrote of Obama, "I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president -- not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans."

Caroline Kennedy, as JFK's relatively apolitical daughter, brings a piece of the mantle to the Obama campaign. Ted Kennedy, as JFK's very political brother, brings the rest of it. Even if other members of the clan back the campaign of Hillary Clinton -- as Robert Kennedy Jr., did in November -- the combination of endorsements from Caroline and Ted effectively delivers the family name to Obama.

That delivery is expected to be completed Monday morning in Washington, where Senator Kennedy and Caroline Kennedy plan to appear with Obama at a rally at American University.

Of all the endorsements that Obama has received, these two may be the most important. And they come at precisely the right moment. "The America of Jack and Bobby Kennedy touched all of us. Through all of these decades, the one who kept that flame alive was Ted Kennedy,'' says Massachusetts Congressman Bill Delahunt, an Obama backer with close ties to Kennedy. "So having him pass on the torch is of incredible significance. It's historic."

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http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters?pid=276186