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Remembering moments from conventions past |
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Sunday, 31 August 2008 |
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Politics as Usual by Jim Baron People do not remember political conventions.
They do, however, remember moments from political conventions.
They remember the first candidate to accept the nomination in person, Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, who flew in one of those new-fangled aeroplanes halfway across the country to Chicago and told the delegates, “I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.”
They remember the Democratic convention in 1968, also in Chicago, where, with what was later called “a police riot” going on in the streets outside the convention hall, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley (father of the current Chicago Mayor Richard Daley) could clearly be seen by the TV cameras shouting the F-word at Connecticut’s Sen. Abraham Ribicoff, who was up on the rostrum denouncing “Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago.”
They remember 1980, when the Democrats gathered in New York, and a defeated but unbowed Ted Kennedy declared that, “the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”
Republicans also had a moment in 1980 — most of a day, in fact — when there were furious negotiations to have former President Gerald Ford take the second spot on the ticket with Ronald Reagan. Like many a sizzling convention possibility, that one fizzled. (Buddy Cianci addressed the 1976 Republican National Convention in Kansas City, but that is only a moment for us homers.) Almost nobody remembers a convention keynote address, but I and many, many other people recall being bowled over four years ago in Boston, when an obscure state Senator from Chicago named Barack Obama made the country sit up and take notice. (I must admit it never crossed my mind that he might be nominated for president at the next convention, although there were some talking about it even then, but I do remember thinking that night that someone might want this fella for a vice-presidential running mate in 2008 or 2012.)
The Democratic convention that just ended in Denver has several moments that are going to endure, including the acceptance speech by Obama. There was also Hillary Clinton, after the closest and one of the most bitter primary battles in recent memory, stepping up to suspend the roll-call and have Obama nominated by acclamation. And there was Ted Kennedy, the party’s liberal lion, rallying to roar one last time.
That is the moment history will remember the longest: Kennedy, ensuring a swell of cheers from the crowd by winding up with an echo of his 1980 speech: “The work begins anew. The hope rises again. And the dream lives on.”
But even if he had said nothing, the legendary senator from the legendary political family stepping on the stage despite what must be a debilitating battle with brain cancer would have been an image weighted with historic heft but endowed with emotional lift.
No matter what you think about Ted Kennedy’s policy positions, you would have to be one hard-hearted soul not to be moved by the scene when he walked out and declared: “And nothing — nothing is going to keep me away from this special gathering tonight.”
Everyone knew the unspoken importance behind those words.
On television, it touched hearts across the nation. But what was it like not only to be inside the convention hall for the speech, but standing on the stage, and not only that, but to have the man speaking be your father?
“Obviously, I was filled with a lot of emotion,” Patrick Kennedy said in a telephone interview last week. He said it was “a source of pride…when you see the response from the convention and saw that he was well enough to deliver his speech and to carry forward his work.”
The younger Kennedy also saw it as a bit of “relief” because “it’s hard to answer everybody that comes up to me in Rhode Island and asks me how he’s doing. If you saw him at the speech, you can see for yourself that he is doing great. He’s obviously taken a very aggressive approach to his treatment that has paid off very successfully for him.”
Ever the canny politician, Kennedy did not go all the way to Denver just to wave hello. He laid down a marker.
The senator “pledged,” despite the illness that he never referred to explicitly in the speech, that he would be on the floor of the U.S. Senate in January to work for what he called “the cause of my life — new hope that we will break the old gridlock and guarantee that every American — north, south, east, west, young, old —will have decent, quality health care as a fundamental right and not a privilege.”
“This is a great moment in his political life,” Patrick Kennedy said. “With a Democratic majority in the United States Senate, a strong House, and a president like Barack Obama, the work he has been toiling to accomplish for the last 45 years, national health insurance, is coming to fruition.”
So will Ted have a chance to stand behind President Barack Obama and perhaps be given one of the pens he uses to sign the national health insurance bill into law?
“That’s the plan,” the congressman said. “The difficult work is building the consensus and America is at a point now where that consensus can be built. The system as it is now has finally reached the breaking point.”
The first time a Kennedy made a splash on the national political scene was when JFK’s name was placed in nomination for vice president at the 1956 Democratic convention in Chicago, the year before I was born. So the Kennedy name has been a significant one in politics my entire lifetime.
I asked Patrick if this represents the end of a political era where the Kennedy name has stood for a sort of influential celebrity.
Ever the dutiful politician, the son noted how his father sees Barack Obama as having the “creative ideals” and ability to “capture the country’s imagination” the way JFK did in 1960, making him capable of picking up the flag.
Pushed a little further, Patrick Kennedy noted that one of the reasons he has championed mental health legislation is so “I am not spending the capital of my family name by letting it wither away on the vine without putting it to some use, advancing a cause that needed advancing.”
He conceded, “It’s a long way from President Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy and my dad and I have no delusions to think I could fill their shoes. But I am not trying to compare myself to them. I’m just trying to do the best I can do and, luckily, I had a father who taught me that is all I needed to do every day when I get up — just do the best I can do.”
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 13 September 2008 )
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