Howie: Close the curtain, for good, on Camelot

The dynasty is a dinosaur.

Camelot finally out of business last night, much like the end of T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Hollow Men.

“This is how the world ends/ Not with a bang, but a whimper.”

The last of the Kennedys, carrying the name of the patriarch of the clan, Joseph P. Kennedy, went down hard to, of all people, Sen. Ed Markey, who spent his entire lackluster career aping the Kennedys, but now ends their 75-year reign over Massachusetts politics.

Markey rolled in the state’s upper-middle-class lily-white suburbs. Kennedy was reduced to carrying the cities, but not by nearly enough, as well as a few working-class towns inhabited by blue-collar Trump voters who took a Democrat ballot Tuesday and don’t much like Markey and his limp, wimp persona.

Markey spent the campaign reprising the role of Fred Astaire, to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ Ginger Rogers, and that’s a clue for the future of the Democrat party, not only in Massachusetts, but in New York. (Are you paying attention, Chuck Schumer?)

JoJoJo Kennedy had the endorsement of the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, who once had a picture of herself taken in high school with his great-uncle, JFK. That’s how old she is – 80 — and last night showed how much her endorsement meant, compared to AOC’s.

And then Pelosi got busted Tuesday for flouting California’s lockdown regulations – Madame Speaker had the worst day of any politician in America.

Except for JoJoJo Kennedy.

He seemed like a shoo-in when he announced last year. He’d never had a real fight. And so he assumed that Ed Markey would fade like everybody else.

One problem: Ed Markey wasn’t perceptive to know that he was toast. And what were his alternatives? Return to Malden, after 48 years in Congress? What was he going to do – go back to his prior career, driving a Mr. Frosty ice-cream truck, dishing out Hoodsies to the street urchins of Malden?

Mr. Frosty had nothing to lose.

JoJoJo needed to get into the Senate so that he could run for president in 2024. He was running for the same reason that JFK ran for the Senate in 1952, because he was just one of the ants, as JFK described the rank and file members, on Nancy Pelosi’s anthill.

And he couldn’t wait. It’s getting harder and harder to be a straight white male in the Democrat party, even if you’re a Kennedy. In four or six years, he might have had Ayanna Pressley sizing him up as the next Mike Capuano.

Or maybe Rachael Rollins, who surely didn’t seem to like him. (She tipped off Rayla Campbell to the fact that Kennedy was holding a press conference with the horrible Monica Cannon-Grant.)

Down the road, it might be good for Rollins to have JoJoJo out of the way. Ditto, Michelle Wu. So the woke mob took him off the board, just like the Kennedys used to knock off their potential future Democrat rivals – Joe Casey, Foster Furcolo, George Bachrach etc.

For JoJoJo, 2020 was up or out, and now it’s out.

JoJoJo tried to paint Mr. Frosty as hopelessly out of touch, which he was, but Ginger Boy was even more clueless. Trying to justify his candidacy, he was more incoherent than his other great-uncle, Teddy, when Teddy was asked by Roger Mudd why he was running for president against another Democrat incumbent in 1980.

JoJoJo didn’t know that four small towns in Worcester County had been flooded by the Quabbin Reservoir back in the 1930’s. Hell, his campaign didn’t even know how to spell Worcester in the Worcester Telegram.

His only platform? “I’m not 74.” Unlike his father, he didn’t say, “Do you know who I am?” because everybody knew who — and what — he was.

A privileged white boy, with a bunch of grainy black-and-white TV ads about his ancestors who’ve been dead these two generations.

The irony? Ed Markey was one of the original “K-Mart Kennedys” – the hacks who grew up worshiping the family and trying to establish their own mini-dynasties. (Remember Mr. Frosty’s younger brother, John, a failed Congressional candidate?)

All those K-Mart Kennedys – the McCormacks, the O’Neills, the Timiltys, the Flahertys, the Connollys, the Iannellas and all the rest. They just wanted to become liegemen, to bask in the reflected glory of America’s First Family.

They never dreamed of dethroning them. And now one of the least of the lesser K-Mart Kennedys, Ed Markey, has dethroned the last heir.

This is our Bosworth Field. The dynasty is ended.

Say what you will about Ed Markey though. He’s a worthy successor in the seat once held by another JFK – John Forbes Kerry. Markey’s been around so long he’s been on almost every side of every issue.

On every issue, like Kerry, he was for it before he was against it. Or vice versa.

But now he’s got six more years, after which, the deluge.

This is how the world ends….

 

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/3lICnLi