Caroline Kennedy endorses Obama

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It wasn’t so much that Caroline Kennedy endorsed Barack Obama, it was the way she endorsed him. This was no perfunctory endorsement, the kind we hear all the time from politicians jockeying for a cabinet position. She titled her op-ed piece in Sunday’s New York Times "A President Like My Father." To this columnist, who has lived through so many of these campaigns, it is a comparison I confess has crossed my own mind more than once.

We are all prisoners of our past. Those of us who have lived long enough to start tempting the actuarial tables are prisoners more than most. For me, listening to Obama’s soaring rhetoric takes me back to another time and place. I am transported to 1960, a frivolous college senior, one who hadn’t thought much about the world he lived in, except how to make a living, meet a girl and live out my own version of the American Dream. I am surrounded by students like me. We all will vote for the first time in the November presidential election. Jack Kennedy has awakened something in us we didn’t know was there. We are waiting for him to arrive on the Temple University campus. You can say we are merely kids waiting to catch a glimpse of a new rock star (many tell us that with scorn), but we are here and we are waiting with churning feelings that there is something greater than our sorry, trivial selves. We who never believed in much of anything now know what it is to believe.

That was how it was in ’60. It was a great time to come of age politically. It was the time of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It was the time when Richard Nixon played the heavy so well. The Cold War had us frightened, but we were alive with the expectancy of youth; alive with the feeling there was nothing we could not conquer.

I felt those feelings only once more. This time it was Bobby Kennedy calling for us to stop the war. I was no longer the same person and the feelings JFK had stirred had already been tainted by assassination. Bobby’s words did not garner my support. I was for clean Gene McCarthy, who treated politics with world-weary scorn. The rifle shots in Dealey Plaza in ’63 had robbed me of my idealism. I was already jaded and full of disdain for the idealists who rushed to support Bobby. The night Bobby was shot, and then Dr. King, was the end of youth for a lot of us. I never hoped to find it again and maybe this new infatuation with the promise of Barack Obama won’t last. Maybe the ugliness of American politics is bound to taint all of us. But the words of Caroline Kennedy haunt us. Along with her, we are remembering how it once was.

It is all eerily familiar — the adoring crowds, the lean youthful candidate with his pretty wife and two young children, the soaring rhetoric of hope. The disappointment of too many years tries to prevent me from getting involved. A voice within warns of the likely disillusionment ahead. I dream the nightmare of assassin’s bullets and wake up scared as hell. Are we fated to live out our worst nightmare over and over again or is it just possible this time the dream will become a reality?

Like those jilted by romance, I promised myself I would never fall in love with a candidate again. One by one, I have seen a procession of mediocrities inhabit the White House for too many years. The candidate of hope always raises more expectations than he or she can deliver. That is the problem with hope: disappointment almost inevitably follows.

Yet against my better judgment, I am taken to another time when it didn’t seem silly to hope, when it seemed as if discretion was not the better part of valor, that the only way to accomplish dreams is to dare to dream.