Life after Teddy?:

...The fierce hatred these men provoked when alive became a little awkward after they were "mar-tyred...

...DIONNE, JR...

...Without knowing it...

...And this one-third was a pretty fair cross-section of Democrats, liberals as weil as conservatives...

...Everyone likes Mondale, but not very much...

...it could also make them, allied with the kind of minority constituency Ken-nedy attracted, a key part of a formidable social move-ment...

...The polls showed that there were many Kennedy-Reagan voters in 1980, as there had been Kennedy-Wallace voters in 1968...

...Only a word from the senator could release these loyalists, and what politician wants to give the signal that will immediately disperse his followers and reduce his influence...

...He has not veered from the old-fashioned liberal conviction that the nation cannot abandon its poor...

...Many people thought John was oppor-tunistic...

...THE KENNEDY BARRIER IS GONE MORE THAN ONE person reacted to Ted Kennedy's withdrawal from the 1984 presidential race by saying, "Well, it shows what a good president he would have made...

...Still, Mondale passed the Groucho Marx test for presidential candidates long before Kennedy, and Kennedy admirers may now have to take a more appreciative look at him...

...In the Senate, he has built a record admired by liberals and respected by many conservatives...

...He is very tough on crime, and pioneered the deregulation of industries where the government was less a guarantor of consumer interests than a guardian of private monopolies and economic inefficiencies...

...Despite these pluses as a potential president, Kennedy had one decisive minus: he couldn't get elected...

...If it was Carter versus Kennedy, Carter won," noted Pat Caddell, Carter's polltaker at the time...

...these people arc Marxists - Groucho Marxists...

...Perhaps they're ex-trapolating from the often precarious status of their own lives, but they're upset enough to consider a Big Change, and don't necessarily worry about the details...

...The question1 remains whether Mondale can convince voters - and party activists - that he would conduct government with any degree of vigor...

...Glenn is the Democratic Eisenhower, whose admirers include both George McGovernhes and Scoop Jacksonites...

...The problem is not that Kennedy was an unworthy politician - far from it...

...This was particularly the case because of the intense loyalty of Kennedy activists and of their unwillingness to abandon him for other candidates even when they admit-ted the barriers facing a Kennedy candidacy...

...Nonetheless, as long as Kennedy was in the running for '84, no other candidates, free of his historical and per-sonal liabilities, could really emerge on the Democratic left...

...Groucho once said that he wouldn't want to belong to any club that would have him as a member...

...Part of Kennedy's appeal to many people was the sense he conveyed of being a "tough liberal," a kind of Democratic Kojak, who pursued his liberal aims with blunt energy and no-nonsense determination...

...The fact is that Kennedy did best in those 1980 primaries held when voters felt he had no chance of becoming president, when he was less a future president than the voice of protest against Jimmy Carter's economic policies...

...With that kind of hole punched out of his potential supporters before a presidential face-off were even to begin, the Massachusetts senator Is indeed like the proverbial fighter with one hand tied behind his back...

...Hie upshot of all this is that polls have shown as many as one-third of the Democratic voters saying, at the time of the 1980 primaries, that they just couldn't bring them-selves to vote for Kennedy, regardless of how they felt about Carter or the other candidates...

...Eugene McCarthy launched a poisoned barb when he said that "Walter has the soul of a vice-president...

...Yet he is no slave to liberal pieties...

...Mondale should have countered that it was a rare day when Eugene McCarthy was heard allowing that any politician besides himself had a soul at all...

...If anything, it should have occurred sooner...

...and a lot of people distrust him, but not very much...

...PETER STHMFELSok at him...

...And as though Charles Dickens were in charge of such matters the campaign was being directed by a gen-tleman named Gary G, Kreep...

...but one can always train it on Teddy instead...

...Recently a mailing went out from something called the United States Justice Founda-tion, announcing "a bold new project...

...These seem to bo people who think that the country needs something more than a tune-up, more than better man-agement or zero-based budgeting...

...All this is probably unfair to Mondale...

...Robert had to face charges of being "ruthless" and "immature...

...DIONNE, JR...

...Whether or not Kennedy's withdrawal is another proof of his presidential capacity, it is probably a very good thing for the Democrats and for the nation...

...Keeping suspicions about Chappaquiddick alive is a small industry, which in the Nixon period was even pa-tronized by the White House...

...PETER STHMFELS...

...That makes them easy targets for demagoguery...

...It's called: PROJECT: End Kennedy's Cover Up...

...At least until Glenn happened along, Mondale was the white bread of presidential candidates, okay to make a sandwich but somehow lacking distinctive character...

...Whatever Kennedy's family reasons for his action, the Democrats should be grateful he pulled out now and spared the party another year of immobility...

...For the moment, the Democrats have Walter Mondale as the vulnerable front-runner, Senator John Glenn coming up fast, Gary Hart waging what could be a dry run for 1988 or'92, and Senators Alan Cranston of California and Ernest Rollings of South Carolina providing interesting action on die sidelines...

...Not since 1952 - thirty years ago - has there been a presidential election without a Kennedy either running for president or vice president {1956, 1960, 1968, 1980) or looming large as a possible candidate (1964, 1972, 1978) for one of those positions...

...If it was Carter versus Carter, Kennedy won...

...As a political leader, he showed that, like his brother Robert, he could speak to and for angry working-class whites who were simultaneously attracted to right-wing protest candidates...

...The Kennedy brothers have always been controversial in American politics...

...And then there is Chappaquiddick...

...Glenn-watching is the political vogue...

...The contents, needless to say, suggested that something other than a disinterested quest for justice was operating here...

...The youngest Kennedy brother also bears the burden of the inevitable historical revisionism that has subjected the easy target of JFK's "Camelot" to a searing skepticism...

...The presidential corollary of this rule is that no one is qualified to be president who hasn't willingly passed up the opportunity to seek the office...