THE NOTE: Dem Establishment Divided in Obama-Clinton Race

Jan. 28, 2008 -- Sen. Ted Kennedy on Monday endorsed Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign, lending the full weight of the Kennedy name to a candidate who is seeking to defeat the Clinton political machine.

Making explicit comparisons to his slain brothers, Kennedy, D-Mass., appeared at a rally in Washington alongside his niece, Caroline, and his son, Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., to make his endorsement official.

"I feel change in the air," Kennedy said to thunderous applause, with a turn-away crowd of more than 4,000 crowding an auditorium at American University.

"Every time I've been asked over the past year who I would support in the Democratic Primary, my answer has always been the same: I'll support the candidate who inspires me, who inspires all of us, who can lift our vision and summon our hopes and renew our belief that our country's best days are still to come," Kennedy said.

"I've found that candidate," he added. "He will be a president who refuses to be trapped in the patterns of the past."

Though Kennedy went out of his way to praise Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and former senator John Edwards, his kind words for Obama included a mention of that fact that Obama has run a largely positive campaign.

"He is a fighter who cares passionately about the causes he believes in, without demonizing those who hold a different view," Kennedy said.

In a veiled reference to former President Bill Clinton -- who has questioned Obama's opposition to the war in Iraq -- Kennedy said Obama has consistently opposed the war. And he said Obama would "turn the page on the old politics of misrepresentation and distortion" -- another apparent tweak at the Clintons, whom he has accused of distorting Obama's record.

"There is the courage, when so many others were silent or simply went along, from the beginning, he opposed the war in Iraq," he said. "And let no one deny that truth."

Sen. Ted Kennedy brings with him a complex bag of sentiments and historical crosscurrents (along with Caroline Kennedy and Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I.) when he makes his endorsement of Sen. Barack Obama official at American University at around noon ET.

No wonder Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton wants to "take a deep breath." She's not just running against Obama anymore -- she's facing down a movement, one that's adding the support of an old guard that's trying to take the Democratic Party back from the family that's dominated it for 16 years.

It's as if the members of the party establishment (those established independent of the Clintons) have suddenly remembered, almost at once, that they don't love the Clintons.

And one more voice weighs in: Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison -- who in 1998 declared Bill Clinton to be the nation's "first black president -- plans to announce her endorsement of Obama on Monday, an Obama campaign source tells The Note.

Meanwhile, Monday night at 9 pm ET, President Bush delivers his final State of the Union address, laying down markers for what promises to be a rough (if not irrelevant) last year.

It's a glimpse of a presidency in decline, without the spark the GOP so desperately wants from its party leaders. The president's tour through Iraq, earmarks, AIDS funding, FISA, tax cuts, and the economy is likely to be less inspiration than distraction to a Republican presidential field that can't figure out what to do with a president that none of them wants to run from or toward.

Kennedy, D-Mass., uses his brothers' legacy lightly and carefully, so his anointing of Obama means something -- with the party's elite liberal base, but also with the blue-collar Democrats who grew up with pictures of John on their walls, and Latinos (particularly in California) who recall Bobby fighting alongside Cesar Chavez (and don't forget immigration reform).

Kennedy will appear with niece Caroline Kennedy, son Patrick Kennedy, and Obama himself in Washington, at American University, where JFK delivered one of his most famous speeches, in June 1963.

It's a nudge meant to suggest that "Obama's claim to the mantle of generations of Kennedys," Susan Milligan writes in The Boston Globe.

"The coveted endorsement is a huge blow to Clinton, who is both a senatorial colleague and a friend of the Kennedy family. In a campaign where Clinton has trumpeted her experience over Obama's call for hope and change, the endorsement by one of the most experienced and respected Democrats in the Senate is a particularly dramatic coup for Obama."

The veteran senator is lending Obama "Kennedy charisma and connections before the 22-state Feb. 5 showdown for the Democratic nomination," Jeff Zeleny and Carl Hulse write in The New York Times. "The endorsement, which followed a public appeal on Mr. Obama's behalf by Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of President John F. Kennedy, was a blow to the Clinton campaign and pits leading members of the nation's most prominent Democratic families against one another."

Another reason why Ted matters: He didn't want to (or have to) do this. (And Bill Clinton's personal appeals for him to stay out of the race didn't stop him.)

"The endorsement appears to support assertions that Mr. Clinton's campaigning on behalf of his wife in South Carolina has in some ways hurt her candidacy," Zeleny and Hulse continue. "Campaign officials, without acknowledging any faults on Mr. Clinton's part, have said they will change tactics and try to shift Mr. Clinton back into the role he played before her loss in the Iowa caucuses, emphasizing her record and experience."

The timing (and Kennedy knows this) is such that the decision looks like a reaction to President Clinton's campaign behavior. "Kennedy's decision came after weeks of his rising frustration with the Clintons over campaign tactics, particularly comments by the couple and their surrogates in South Carolina that seemed to carry racial overtones," Shailagh Murray and Anne Kornblut write in The Washington Post.

"Kennedy expressed his frustrations directly to the former president, but to no avail."

It's not just the Kennedys who are falling into line for Obama, as the non-Clinton Democratic establishment comes together coalesces (along with with scattered red-staters -- and Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, D-Kan., is next, after she delivers the Democratic response to the State of the Union) to try to steer a party into a new direction.

Obama spoke both for them and to them, in an interview on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" on Sunday. "There is no doubt that I think that in the '90s, we got caught up in a slash-and-burn politics that the American people are weary of," Obama said. "And we still see it in Washington today."

It's been a long time coming, The New Republic's Noam Scheiber reports in the magazine's new issue. "For people like [John] Kerry and [Tom] Daschle and especially their former advisers, the Clintons' continued presence at the center of Democratic politics has sometimes chafed over the last eight years," Scheiber writes.

"It may not be apparent beyond the Beltway, but the Clintons kept their grip on Democratic Washington long after leaving the White House. . . . If you've looked for a job in the Democrats' government-in-exile lately, chances are you've hit up a Clintonite."

How did the Clintons burn so much goodwill so quickly? Why is the establishment candidate facing a revolt from inside the establishment?

Start with persistent concerns that Sen. Clinton's candidacy would guarantee a revival of the pitched partisan battles of the past two decades. Sprinkle in Bill's performance of the last few weeks, which persisted right up through the primary in South Carolina with his comparison of Obama to Jesse Jackson.

Add to it a broader sense of how Hillary was running her campaign -- another factor that hurt her with voters in South Carolina every bit as much as it hurt her with party regulars in Washington, Bloomberg's Al Hunt writes.

"Hyperbole is a staple of American political campaigns. Senator Hillary Clinton has crossed the line into distortion," writes Hunt (hardly a Clinton basher). "She has flagrantly misrepresented her own and her opponents' positions or statements. The general tone, more than any specifics, of the Clinton effort contributed to Barack Obama's stunning 2-to-1 victory over her in the South Carolina Democratic presidential primary this past weekend."