STILL TED'S PARTY:

The Kennedy Comeback (WILLIAM SAFIRE, 1/26/04, NY Times)

assumptions, to be tested soon enough, have Democratic soothsayers predicting a Kerry-Edwards ticket at the Boston convention. What delicious diversity: North and South, with Kerry's fatal Massachusettsism ameliorated by Edwards's Carolina charm; the experience of craggy Kerry enlivened by the passionate optimism of the boyish Edwards.

But the political philosophy these two men have embraced is lopsidedly leftist: In this campaign, they have clawed their way up the greasy pole of politics with a pitch that is pure populism. Both men have risen high in Democratic polls with a brand of class resentment and soak-the-rich rhetoric rooted in the old-fashioned liberalism of Ted Kennedy.

I used to think that the battle within the Democratic Party would pit the centrist Clinton Restoration, using Clark as its sacrificial lamb this time around, against the maverick antiwar, antiestablishment legion that Dean had excited. Though Dean also railed against the rich, his signature attraction was his antiwar anger.

As Dean machine-gunned himself in the foot — in gaffes that dismayed Iowans weeks before his primal pep talk — his support did not switch to Clark, the inept amateur handled and financed by the Clintonites. Instead, many disillusioned Deaniacs went to a third faction that has long been lying in the Democratic weeds: the proponents of class warfare propounded for a generation by Ted Kennedy.

Not by John F. Kennedy, the president who cut taxes and would "bear any burden" in the defense of liberty. But by the Old Left led by his brother Teddy, scourge of conservative judges and free-market medicine, whose aging acolytes have tried to keep the not-so-hot liberal flame burning under the rich and powerful.

The resuscitation of this long-dormant faction among Democrats surprised me. But with his campaign in the doldrums as Dean's restorative rage invigorated both the new Netties and the Old Left, John Kerry turned to his Senate senior and Massachusetts mentor for succor.

The class warfare theme, a specialty of Mr. Kerry's campaign guru, Bob Shrum, is useful for winning Democratic primaries and even statewide elections in some places, but, as Mr. Safire notes, routinely loses presidential elections.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 26, 2004 09:10 AM