Why it hurts to believe in Barack O’Bobby
We must talk of Robert Kennedy because he matters, especially this year, a presidential election year in the 40th June since he died young and heroic and needlessly. Imagine Bobby Kennedy at brother Ted’s age, only older. And then imagine their oldest surviving brother Jack Kennedy at the age of 91. And all three brothers are sitting side by side. It is impossible to imagine, not because the idea of them together is difficult to conjure, what with the morph technology and all — it is just impossible to imagine a world without dead Kennedys, one president of the United States, his younger brother certain to become the next. Dead Kennedys haunted my childhood and my adulthood. Loving Bobby was almost harder than losing Jack. Many of us ache, and I mean ache, when we think what might have been. Had Bobby lived.
To describe Barack Obama as the Bobby Kennedy of his generation is, sorta, kinda, maybe — EXACTLY — like what is going on today. Except Obama isn’t running against a sitting Democratic president embroiled in an unpopular foreign war. Obama is running against eight years of Bush-Cheney. There’s no way Barack can lose this, is there? [Read more →]
