Return of mama's boy
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington 'Mama, Mama, kin I run for President, Kin I? Kin I, pleeeeze?'
'Not till you've had your bath, Teddy dear.'
'But Mama, you said I could if I'd wait and take my nap.'
'And you did wait, like Mama's good boy, but, Teddy sweets, you must have a bath before you declare. We wouldn't want our President to have dirt in his tummy dimples or between his little piggy toes.' With the announcement that his aged and honourable mother, and his estranged and alcoholic wife, have given Edward Kennedy Permission to run for the presidency, there Is no predicting" where else 'dirt' may be discovered on, in, or around the Senator for Massachusetts as he moves in his coy, circuitous way towards a presidential campaign. In New Hampshire, the state with the nation's first presidential primary next February, the other mother, `Miz Lillian', fought back for her boy `Jimmeh', telling s?trie 400 people at a Democratic Party Picnic: 'As for Sen. Kennedy. . . if he does I hope to goodness nothing happens to him, I really do.' From the audience, an admixture of groans, gasps and low whistles was heard in response to what was taken as an allusion to the oft-expressed belief Kennedy will be murdered if he runs. 'A dirty dig from a little old lady,' an astonished woman whispered. And any campaign which begins with octogenarian females striking below the belt may end with Kennedy actually shooting himself. For not only are the Carters, ardent Christians though they may be, ardent fighters as well, but the Democratic politicians, who think Kennedy can save them from defeat next year, haven't Yet faced the fact that the Senator is a man who walks, and always will walk, in the Penumbra of scandal. It will be impossible to keep personal scandal out of the campaign, since most of What Kennedy offers are the personal qualities his supporters so delight in. The Pokey differences between Carter and Kennedy are too slight to support his insurgency. Prudent people do not unseatan incumbent President of their own party because they like one man's medical insurance proposal better than the other man's not dissimilar Proposal . That, and the other issues which In, ay divide the two men, aren't the kind you start a political civil war over — not, that is, unless „, You are a person named Dudley „Uu'lleY, the woman leading Kennedy's New riaMpshire charge — 'a clamling blonde,' according to the male political writers at ork making the Kennedy effort into a 'ashien parade. But the discoverY of this Dudley Dudley, an unreconstructed hippie who heats with wood and lives off health foods, is a sign that the enthusiasm for Kennedy may already have breached the limits of workaday politics and policy. It is now almost forgotten that Edward Kennedy has been one of the most consistent and reliable of the Carter administration's supporters in the Senate. Kennedy seems to want the same things that Carter does, only faster and bigger. The difference between the men may be best expressed by observing that under Ford, America had one-figure inflation, under Carter two-figure, and with Kennedy we're in danger of adding on a third.
The people in ecstasy over the kid brother are after a commodity called 'leadership', which they believe Carter lacks and in which Kennedy abounds. There is to question that the playboy Senator can give the roof-raising, goose-pimpling speech, which the Georgia peanut is incapable of, even when he remembers to clench his fist and try to look forceful. But there is a mite more to leadership, even here in Mediavil le, than looking pretty and carrying a resonant baritone voice. It has been forgotten, for example, that Kennedy was removed from his leadership position in the Senate. He was once majority whip, but lost the job to Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia because of his inattentive failure to perform it. Thus, as a leader of his party in the legislature, Senator Gayblades is already a certifiable flop.
On the positive side, those people who are supposed to be competent in judging these matters say that he has been an able Senator in the task of representing his home state, and that, as a member and now chairman of the important Judiciary Committee, he may not always have been judicious, but he has consistently fought the `over-dogs' in supporting measures to help minorities and other less fortunately placed people. For many, this record has erased the picture of Kennedy as the indulged, and self-indulgent, tycoon's youngest son, who cheated at college and grew up to be an irresponsible roué who has never satisfactorily explained the death of that girl at Chappaquiddick. One person who would be delighted to see Kennedy at the top of the Democratic ticket is ex-Democrat, ex-Governor of Texas, ex-Secretary of the Navy under John Kennedy and ex-Secretary of the Treasury under Richard Nixon, John Connally, Connally has, in matters financial, the same reputation that Kennedy has in matters sexual but, after Ronald Reagan, he has to be considered the person with the best chance of the Republican nomination. 'I'm the only certified not-guilty candidate run ning in either party. The jury heard the evidence and said "Not guilty," quoth honest John about his trial for taking a 10,000 dollar bribe from the milk industry. Some of his enemies say that it was his lawyer's talent that saved him, and that the only weak part of the prosecution's case was the smallness of the sum he was alleged to have taken.
In any event, with Kennedy as his opponent, the campaign next year will undoubtedly be conducted without reference to ethical conduct. Washington's worldly-wise politicians, especially if they are backing Kennedy or Connally, like to insist that too close an inquiry into the private lives of office-holders will only confirm the hypothesis about the imperfection of Man. This may be so with lesser public officials, but not with the first magistrate. Presidents not only lead and administer, they also preside; that is they take up the sacerdotal office of the heaviest symbolic and ceremonial importance. The President is the Pontifex Maximus in the national cathedral, where all the stone ribs of our society, cultural, moral and economic, meet in a political apex.
When Carter assumed office, the presidency, at least in its pontifical aspects, had been seriously injured. Richard Nixon had turned the White House into a gangster headquarters, Lyndon Johnson had turned it into a saloon, and John Kennedy had made it a brothel — or so it seems to millions. To the extent he was able, Ford turned the White House back into a place of probity and, in this same area, Carter has truly led the nation by restoring the moral tone in its entirety. The tone is Calvinist, a tone which many of us do not adopt in the conduct of our own lives, but one which we admire and respect when it comes from the man handling the priestly duties of the President.
Now comes Kennedy and his family, a family which stinks in the nostrils of the hard-working middle classes. Even as he made his quasi-announcement of candidacy, the next item on the news broadcast concerned another Kennedy in hospital as a possible drug addict. It is only a matter of time before the story published in England about Ethel Kennedy's alleged shoplifting moves into general view here. And, the loves and debauches of other Kennedys aside, there is the playboy Senator himself. Will the playboy President's press secretary have to spend his days denying the embarrassing 'true confessions' of this week's girl-friend?
The Carters have their problems with Billy, and with some cousin in a prison out West, but in the main, Carter — even with Hamilton Jordan and the cocaine — has re-established the White House as the home of sober industry. It will be disestablished if that consanguineous clot of rich, arrogant, spoiled, scandal-plagued, escapade-prone jet-setters moves in. Four years of that bunch, and the next time around the Ayatollah Khomeini can fly in and start the sexual counter-revolution.
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