The Kennedy Joke
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Rep. Patrick Kennedy has come out swinging against the man who
now sits in the senate seat his father held for 47 years. Telling
a blog for the Hill newspaper that Senator Scott Brown
was “in the tank for the Republicans,” the Rhode Island Democrat
called Brown’s candidacy a “joke.”
The putdown is a familiar one for the Kennedy family. Forty-eight
years ago, a thirty-year-old Ted Kennedy heard the same taunt
from his primary opponent, Massachusetts Attorney General Edward
McCormack: “If his name was Edward Moore, with his
qualifications-with your qualifications, Teddy-if it was Edward
Moore, your candidacy would be a joke. But nobody’s laughing
because his name is not Edward Moore. It’s Edward Moore Kennedy.”
Kennedy, after all, had never held a steady paying job, save for
a two-year stint in the Army, prior to winning the senate seat.
At Harvard he had been kicked out for cheating and at the
University of Virginia’s law school he had led police on drunken
high speed chases. The young playboy’s appearance on the Senate
floor a day after his election must have struck observers then
the way Senator Paris Hilton would appear to us today.
Though the shoe fit for Ted Kennedy back in 1962, the “joke” tag
seems an odd one for Senator Scott Brown. Brown’s father didn’t
buy him the election. The president and the attorney general
aren’t his brothers. His grandfather wasn’t the mayor of Boston.
A family friend wasn’t appointed placeholder senator for his
benefit. A product of a broken home, Brown and his mother briefly
relied on welfare. He is a graduate of the public schools and
used ROTC, and a much publicized semi-nude spread in
Cosmopolitan, to help fund his education. Scott Brown is the
anti-Kennedy.
Instead of the advantages of name and money enjoyed by the
Kennedys, Scott Brown faced a 31-point deficit in the polls less
than two months before his election. Brown could not look to his
party for a single statewide or federal office holder from
Massachusetts. So pathetic had the Massachusetts Republican Party
become that it fielded opponents in just four of ten House races
in 2008, not eclipsing the thirty percent mark in any of those
contests. Both houses of the Massachusetts General Court have
been in Democrat hands for more than a half century. Yet, Brown
managed to paint the bluest state red (if for only one election).
Patrick Kennedy’s outburst seems less reflection of Brown’s
candidacy than projection of the eight-term congressman’s own
woes. In May of 2006, Kennedy infamously crashed his
headlights-off Mustang into a Capitol Police barrier. Appearing
drunk to some officers at the scene, the congressman claimed he
was “late for a vote”-at 2:45 a.m. Kennedy nevertheless avoided a
field sobriety test and received a ride home. The obligatory
rehab stint followed, which was followed by yet another one last
June. Atop bouts with cocaine, alcohol, and OxyContin, Kennedy
has battled bipolar disorder.
These demons appear to have influenced Kennedy’s erratic
headline-grabbing behavior. In 2000, he abandoned a yacht off
Martha’s Vineyard that a rental company charged he had trashed to
the tune of $28,000 in damages. The same year he shoved a female
airport security guard at LAX in a do-you-know-who-I-am moment.
To a meeting of Young Democrats in 2003, a candid Kennedy
boasted: “I have never worked a f—ing day in my life.” Though
Kennedy hails from the most Catholic state in the union, he last
year strangely publicized a past row with his bishop regarding
the impropriety of the pro-abortion-rights representative
receiving communion and launched an attack on the Catholic Church
for its objections to abortion funding within the health-care
legislation supported by the president.
Kennedy’s bizarre behavior may have finally overshadowed his name
and fortune. A poll released last week by Providence’s WPRI-TV
reported Patrick Kennedy’s disapproval ratings at 62 percent
throughout Rhode Island and 56 percent within his district. Rhode
Island state representative John J. Loughlin II, a well-funded
Scott Brown-clone who has hired several of the key operatives
behind the Massachusetts Miracle, announced his candidacy against
Kennedy on Thursday. Should the National Guard veteran win, it
would mark the first Congress without a Kennedy in almost a half
century.
Even the colorful Buddy Cianci, the ex-con “Prince of
Providence,” mulls a run for Kennedy’s seat. “Patrick is
definitely, in my opinion, beatable. He’s not as strong as he
used to be,” the former mayor of Providence told the Boston
Herald last month. “He’s had a number of problems that have
distracted him from the business of governing and legislating.”
That’s a nuanced way of saying that Patrick Kennedy is a joke.
And in the midst of a thirteen percent statewide unemployment
rate, few Rhode Islanders find it funny anymore to send a
mentally-ill recovering drug addict to the House of
Representatives for another term.
