Edward Kennedy Jr. opened his moving eulogy to his father Saturday morning with a quip aimed at the august group sitting before him. "My father used to say, 'I don't mind not being president, I just mind that someone else is,'" he said.
Television cameras quickly panned to President Obama and three former presidents, each of them flashing a knowing grin. But the late senator's remark was particularly poignant to me for a reason that had nothing to do with men named Obama, Bush or Clinton. On that rainy Saturday morning, Boston's Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help may have contained one of the most powerful groups of American politicians ever assembled in one room. But it also was filled with men and women who, like Kennedy, were burdened with personal and political flaws, and who, like Kennedy, had to overcome the searing sting of defeat.
The Mission Church overflowed with stunted ambitions and failed dreams.
You didn't have to look beyond the front pew to find the first example. Jimmy Carter may have turned back Kennedy's challenge in the 1980 Democratic primaries, but he went on to lose his bid for a second term to Ronald Reagan, becoming the first president to do so after a full four-year term since Herbert Hoover. For a generation, he symbolized Democratic decline, the man who allowed the Reagan Revolution to flourish. But today, Carter is widely respected as a humanitarian.
Sitting in the pew behind Carter, and the man who defeated her in the 2008 Democratic primaries, was Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose defeat was more recent, and, on that day, perhaps more personal. She fell from inevitable nominee to runner-up in part because of the full-throated endorsement Obama received from Kennedy. But despite that bruising race and stinging rebuke, Clinton remains a political force in her own right. That much was clear to anyone watching the contrast between Clinton and her husband Saturday as they entered the church. While he walked silently behind her, she was mobbed by friends, admirers and local pols, supporters from her campaign, all vying for her attention.
Two other candidates who fell short of winning the White House last year sat nearby. Next to Obama was Joe Biden, whose setback in the 2008 primary wasn't even his most famous presidential defeat. Given the decades Biden and Kennedy spent together in the Senate, the tributes he offered in the days after Kennedy's death were more intimate than Obama's could ever be. Those decades of service may have undercut his appeal on the 2008 campaign trail, but they tend to serve him well in the White House. Meanwhile, Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., returned to the Senate after a humiliating showing in the Iowa caucuses to lead a robust banking reform bill through Congress.
Like Clinton, Al Gore came face to face with the man who defeated him for president at Kennedy's funeral. But any animosity between Gore and George W. Bush from 2000 seemed like ancient history. Another former vice president, Dan Quayle, who planned to run for president in 2000 until his eighth-place finish in the Ames straw poll, also flew to Boston to say goodbye to his former Senate colleague. Sens. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Arlen Specter, D-Pa., and former Sen. Birch Bayh, D-Ind., who also saw White House ambitions fade quickly before their eyes, were also there.
There were the two Massachusetts liberals, Sen. John Kerry and former Gov. Michael Dukakis, whose presidential bids were blocked by Bushes.
The Mission Church, to use the basilica's fitting local name, overflowed that morning with stunted ambitions and failed dreams, held by people who, as Obama said about Kennedy, could easily have allowed themselves to "become bitter and hardened; to surrender to self-pity and regret; to retreat from public life and live out [their] years in peaceful quiet. And no one would have blamed [them] for that." It deepened the tribute to Kennedy that the men and women who gathered to mourn his loss have fought so hard to endure. Some have succeeded, some have not. But like Kennedy, they have all enriched the country's political fabric by participating in the process.
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