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?

And now I’m getting a creepy feeling all over because I am about to add, “Unless.” Unless something happened. Now what could happen to the first black presidential candidate that hasn’t happened to half a dozen dead white presidents? Hell, Ronald Reagan took a bullet. And everyone loved Reagan. Except those who didn’t. And one of them was a nut. We don’t have to turn many pages in American history to encounter assassinated presidents. And they are always, after John Wilkes Booth, lone assassins rather than conspirators. The night Lincoln was shot in Fords Theater, Booth’s co-conspirators broke into the secretary of state’s house, cut his throat and went on a hunt for the vice president. Since then, they’re all weirdos, every presidential assassin or near-assassin. Not one of them adds up to a fart, not even the Cigarette Smoking Man. Lee Harvey Oswald my ass. Sirhan Sirhan who?

We are a nation of assassins, are we not? We kill our neighbors and our presidents. Why? Because we don’t like one and the other is dating Jodie Foster. Nothing has made sense in America since the hurt of Robert F. Kennedy’s life. Ended the way it was. It took me years to understand it, and I’m not even sure I do. All I know is that everything would be different if Bobby had lived. No Nixon, no Cambodia, start with that. No Kent State. No Watergate. That’s what I mean, it’s impossible to imagine. I mean Bobby Kennedy wasn’t Pope John Paul the Great. Of course, he didn’t live to be 83.

But Bobby Kennedy was everything Barack Obama is except colored. Harvard educated. Erudite. Yet with a common touch. Elitist. Only in America is elitism considered a flaw in a candidate for president. When exactly did that happen? After Franklin Delano Rooselvet stopped smoking with a long fruity-looking cigarette holder. I kinda like my president being smarter than me. I don’t want him to think I think he’s smarter than me, but it would be comforting to know he probably was.

This brings us to George Bush. Which of course sends me running screaming out of the room. Are we still confused about George Bush, intellectual capacities, lack thereof? He walked into Iraq like some teenage virgin in a slasher flick parody. Future generations will scarce believe that one such as Bush, in flesh and blood, got away with this shit without being strung up from a lamppost. And believe me, that’s what keeps presidents honest. That’s why we have a second amendment. Much as we find it inconvenient. The Framers couldn’t have imagined a world with assault rifles in the hands of children and cop killers. But they did understand a threat perceived is a threat acknowledged. And the second amendment fires a big one across the bow of Washington — and I mean, literally, George Washington, and his “central government.” The Second Amendment is the “Come and Get Me Coppers!” declaration of the Bill of Rights.

I’m not saying it’s beautiful, but damned if it doesn’t work. The Constitution, I mean. Most of the time, somehow. A lot of times certainly. And in spite of that, America is still capable of electing George Bush twice, thrice and we’re still not out of it. How does this country stay alive electing knuckleheads like that president? (And I don’t mean the father, who knew when to end a war in Iraq.) That is our mystery to the world, I’m sure. How can something that looks so good be so dumb?

And here comes the best shot for the Democrats to change the world since Bobby and the candidate’s name rhymes with Yo’mama. And this is real life in the world of America in the year 2008. For a lot of us, and I know there are a lot of us, this is a huge page to turn. The weight is so very heavy. The hurt so real it’s hard to believe it’s a memory from long ago. Or last week. Race in America doesn’t go away. It just goes on television.

So, yes, let me just put it out there. I fear for Barack Obama the same way I feared for Bobby Kennedy. I only wish I didn’t know how so many stories end. Which I guess is exactly the point. You never know. Especially when you think you do.

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