Who is Kennedy For?
MORTON, BRUCE
PRESIDENTIAL TEASING Who Is Kennedy For? bybrucemorton EDWARD M. KENNEDY "Wi Washington 'hat the hell are they doing?" The speaker was Dan Horgan, who ran the Carter Administration whip...
...Kennedy is, in fact, a good senator...
...Turning on crowds is a Kennedy trick...
...Friends say this sense of obligation has eased some as the children have grown older and gone off to college, but it is still a factor...
...Will he run after all...
...Probably not...
...if President Carter sank and sank in the polls...
...Still, if Kennedy says he is not seeking the presidency, why do people keep talking about him as a candidate...
...Reporters who cover the Senate regularly say Kennedy is looking forward to becoming chairman of the Judiciary Committee...
...many of them worked in his brothers' campaigns...
...The last of the Camelot boys had done it again...
...And Kennedy would not make the race, one advisor says, unless he felt there was some overriding matter on which he and the President were split...
...Kennedy likes politicking, likes campaigning...
...progress, not reaction...
...when pressed, Kennedy responds that he prefers his words to Sherman's or anyone else's...
...Kennedy has repeatedly demonstrated that he offers those things in spades...
...On merit, that may be wise...
...John used it as a campaign platform...
...Those happen, of course, to be early caucus and primary states, but Kennedy just smiles at that...
...I've been trying to get there for years...
...Or to put it another way: health care ain't no Vietnam...
...a lot of voters registered today do not even remember what it was...
...He does not quote General Sherman's famous, "If nominated, I will not campaign...
...He takes up the post this month, following the retirement of James Eastland of Mississippi...
...But some who know the Senator well do not think he would yield even under such circumstances...
...So Kennedy has a special appeal to those in the party who identify with that older New Deal tradition??to blacks, to the veteran leaders of big labor...
...The President may have overcome his earlier image of incompetency, but he doesn't turn Democrats on...
...Another reason concerns issues...
...For all their publicized differences on health care, Kennedy and Carter agree on nine issues out of 10...
...For a generation, however, Democrats have marched to different music: to the idea that theirs is the party that rights wrongs, redresses social ills...
...He is courteous to his colleagues, patient with Senate procedures and, as John Culver of Iowa has observed, "He really enjoys the legislative process...
...We ought to be looking for an esprit de corps...
...They chose well...
...Although Kennedy says no, he says it very carefully...
...It is a senior and prestigious post...
...And there is the matter of family responsibilities...
...I suppose," he told the New Hampshire Democrats, "you're wondering why I'm here...
...For one thing, he is the first of the Kennedy brothers who does not think the Senate is a waste of time...
...Thus Memphis was very much the President's affair...
...No, there are very different reasons why he will probably stay where he is...
...of the dozens of workshops scattered through the convention center, this was the one almost every delegate came to see...
...the crowd would have loved it just the same...
...They disagree on issues...
...But it's always the wrong year...
...He may be right, Democrats may have to deal with these problems, but they don't have to like it...
...The reason he is unlikely to make the race is not Chappaquiddick...
...Labor, party leaders, all the elements of the old Kennedy coalition would urge him to make the race...
...He does it well, and he likes doing it...
...A Time magazine poll last August showed that 53 per cent of the sample "strongly agreed" that the time had come to forget Chappaquiddick...
...They are comfortable with his goals and with his style...
...He is, among other things, a presidential tease...
...Ever since his brother Robert's death, Kennedy has felt that he is father figure for both his own children and his brother's...
...if elected, I will not serve...
...Vice President Walter Mondale told a bored Memphis audience, "We don't live in a perfect world...
...in the happy noise he could have been yelling names from the Memphis telephone directory...
...the party that uses government to improve the lot of the less fortunate members of society...
...And he is fortunate because the things a loyal Democratic senator would have done this past fall??fund-raising, appearing for candidates??are exactly the same things a senator who wanted to be President would have done...
...Ted Kennedy is different...
...Yet who could forget the conference's one moment of genuine excitement, when Edward Kennedy dropped in for a chat about national health insurance...
...The Administration is committed to fighting inflation, to bringing the Federal budget into, or at the minimum closer to, a balance...
...I sympathize," he told the recent Black Caucus dinner, "with John Con-yers' desire to go to Camp David...
...Do all the jokes mean he is running for President...
...You couldn't make out by then what Kennedy was talking about...
...The formula varies little...
...He has always had one of the best staffs on Capitol Hill, and over the years he has acquired expertise of his own in a lot of areas??health care, for instance, and reform of the Federal criminal code...
...He stopped, finally, grinning a big Irish grin, and they kept shouting...
...if the Administration's efforts to curb inflation and balance the budget failed anyway??if all this happened, there would be enormous pressures on Kennedy to fill the gap...
...he really likes the creaky old place...
...Another 26 per cent "partially" agreed, and 76 per cent said Chappaquiddick wouldn't cause them to vote against Kennedy if they thought he were the better candidate...
...The dimly lit hall was packed...
...One reason is Jimmy Carter...
...Horgan cheered up later on when he learned the Jimmy Carter had won the poll, getting 58 per cent of the delegates to Senator Edward M. Kennedy's 34 per cent...
...Democrats in Memphis, "to come to Democratic conventions, to be asked to be a speaker...
...That may emerge sometime in the future, but it docs not now exist...
...Kennedy and Carter differ in style...
...Either way, the schedule would have been identical...
...The speaker was Dan Horgan, who ran the Carter Administration whip operation last month at the Democrats' Memphis midterm conference...
...Then Campbell adds, "Democrats don't have an anti-Carter fix, but they have no leadership, no direction, no emotion...
...Some who know him simply hope he will not run, fearing yet another family tragedy...
...If he ran for the White House in 1980, the news media would without question revive that story...
...In the end, though, it may come down to issues...
...He had just learned that, as the conference's final session was starting, CBS was polling the delegates on who the party's presidential nominee should be in 1980...
...Instead, he notes that he expects President Carter to be the nominee and declares," I have every intention of supporting him...
...Will he do it...
...The old-fashioned programmatic liberals, who had dominated the party since Franklin D. Roosevelt's time, were a sizeable minority, but a minority nonetheless...
...Or, as one Carter White House staffer put it, jogging for President...
...The Democratic party," the senior senator from Massachusetts put it, "ought to stand for something...
...Mondale was referring to inflation and the budget...
...He did it at the New Hampshire state convention earlier last year, did it in Massachusetts for victorious senatorial candidate Paul Tsongas, in Iowa for defeated Senator Dick Clark...
...We've got to deal with the problems that are ours...
...I'm always delighted," he told the Bruce Morton, here making his first appearance in the NL, is a correspondent for CBS News in Washington...
...By the time Kennedy finished his speech, arms waving, voice booming through the loudspeakers, the crowd was standing, shouting back, clapping, cheering, and stamping its feet...
...If Camp David evaporated, as in one sense it seems to have done...
...Edward Campbell, the party chairman in Iowa, thinks the President is a good, decent man...
...But Chappaquiddick took place 10 years ago...
...That was almost the same margin by which the Carter forces won the conference's one roll call vote: on a liberal effort to commit the Democrats to maintaining spending for social programs at least at last year's levels...
...Robert, who disliked both small talk and dither, chafed at the Senate's time-wasting procedures and was given to reminding pompous colleagues that, if they had only done their homework, the hearing would have lasted only half as long...
...He thinks Kennedy has made a promise to his mother, and will never run while she is alive...
...Kennedy has even called some of their disagreements "basic," and there he is with the cheers in his ears...
...House Speaker Thomas O'Neill goes further...
Vol. 62 • January 1979 • No. 2
