Forgetting Chappaquiddick
Christopher Hitchens
New York Afew mornings ago, Senator Edward Moore Kennedy of Massachusetts was being interviewed on CBS news by Diane Sawyer. She relayed to him a joke that had been made to her by Richard Nixon a little earlier. The former President has said that Kennedy would probably get the Demo- cratic nomination for 1984. After all, he cbserved with his famously tasteful wit, by then Chappaquiddick would be behind him and he would have had time to lose twenty pounds. Confronted with this little sally the Senator looked like a man who has had a cigar blow up in his face. The best he could do was to say that his sisters agreed about the twenty pounds. With a horrid shock, all present suddenly realised that Kennedy was running. Oh no. Not all that again.
I journeyed to Philadelphia to witness the Senator's latest attempt on the almost ex- hausted virtue of the Democratic Party. His performance could hardly have been more vulgar and offputting, and his reception could hardly have been more enthusiastic.
I went to a gigantic party that he threw on the second night of the mid-term Con- vention, in a huge club appropriately called La Bourse. It was impossible to count the guests and impossible to estimate the cost of the lobsters, the many free bars and the other entertainments. But it was clearly not a party given by a hesitant .candidate. The Senator made a smug appearance during which one could see why he keeps mention- ing his sisters. He has no wife with whom to campaign any more, so he tows round a gaggle of female relatives as if to say, 'See, I still have a family'. (This policy is not pur-
sued with half measures either. When he finally made his speech to the delegates, he brought them all on to the podium twice a performance he repeated the next weekend in Boston at the gathering of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People.) On these occasions, Kennedy reminds me irresistibly of the judgment made by Katherine Whitehorn on Kenneth Harris. He really does look as if he's wearing mink knickers.
The effect on crowds, especially on crowds who have been warmed with hospitality, is extraordinary. 'What a face — will yob look at that face' I heard a group of older women gasping behind me. In fact, Kennedy's face does tell you all you need to know. It's rather puffy now, and it smirks a lot, but it looks very nervous. When it speaks, it punctuates the paragraphs with nodding motions at each applause line, somehow anticipating the claps and cheers and annoyingly contriving to acknowledge them before they've actual- ly been offered. The sole stirring feature is the voice, but that only works on people who remember the days of JFK, and since Kennedy reads most of his speeches he manages to throw away the asset anyway.
It must be said, however, that against the competition in Philadelphia it was hard for him not to shine. The Democratic Party is in the most awful condition. Forty-seven of its Congressional members have all but defected to the Reagan camp, using their votes to pass the President's amazing budget and to endorse his other domestic initiatives. This both undercuts the Democratic attack on Reagan's unfairness to the poor, and reminds them that elec- torally they have no serious platform.
Increasingly febrile attempts are being made to cobble up a plausible script for the mid-term elections this November. Three rather fuzzy choices are currently on offer. The first is Kennedyism, which is basically old-line liberalism laced with media bar- rages and what passes for charisma. Ideologically, this is thin gruel and relies on. invoking Franklin Roosevelt's memory in his centenary year. Then there is Walter Mondale, who is running strongly if only to leave behind him the memory of having been Jimmy Carter's Vice-President. Again, his rhetoric in New Dealish and even populist, with a slight agrarian flavour. Finally, there is a clutch of younger politi- cians who have become known as the 'neo- liberals'.
These people, as their modish title im- plies, are devoted to the idea of a re-think. They think that the Democrats must aban- don the sentimental welfarist consensus which stresses decaying northern industrial and racial constituencies and ignores the so- called 'Sun Belt' of high-technology pro- duction, and innovation. They are sometimes nicknamed 'Hatari Democrats' because of their obsession with Japan, which they regard as the model industrial state. In the view of the neo-liberals (best presented by Senator Gary Hart of Col- orado and Senator Paul Tsongas, the other senator from Massachusetts) the role of the State is not to wither away. It is, rather, to nourish and sponsor capital investment and exports. Nothing very radical about that, even if it does sound like Bolshevism in the present climate. Except that the neo-liberals do criticise excessive spending on ar- maments as a cause of Japan's lead in technology and miniaturisation. For Kennedy, these people are a pro- blem. He is strongest in his appeal to groups like the Spanish, the black and the female. Aside from his 100 per cent stand in favour of anything Israel cares to do, he is also generally well received (though not very well liked) among critics of American foreign policy. All this stuff about technology and investment bores and baf- fles him. It doesn't make for the ringing speech about justice and humanity. He made that speech at Philadephia, and got a rather stilted ovation for it from delegates who were keen to demonstrate their unity to their cameras. But after the mid-term polls, and with the advent of the primaries, he'll have to come up with something a bit more durable. That will be a lot harder than los- ing twenty pounds or showing off his sisters. I predict, however, that Richard Nixon is mistaken about the Senator's abili- ty to put Chappaquiddick behind him. Unknown to almost anybody except Ken- nedy and your correspondent, a book has been written on that subject and will be published before we're very much older. It will be published by Random House and, if people still retain any capacity to be shock- ed, it may well keep mink knickers off the ballot.
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