We've seen how this drama plays out

(Robert Grossman illustration)

AFTER THE Democratic primaries in June of 1980, Jimmy Carter had won 24 contests and Edward M. Kennedy had won 10. The president had a hefty delegate lead and was ahead in the popular vote by 2.7 million. The challenger was not deterred. "On to the convention!" was the Kennedy campaign's motto.

Many Democrats, having seen this kamikaze flight path before, shudder in the shock of recognition. The campaign of Hillary Clinton in 2008, like Kennedy's in 1980, has embodied the strength and weakness of dynastic politics. Some dynastic struggles have a happy ending; most don't.

In July of 2007, the New York senator enjoyed a 16-point Gallup Poll lead over Senator Barack Obama of Illinois. In July of 1979, the Massachusetts senator was ahead of Carter by 31 points. As an idea in the subjunctive mood, the Kennedy and Clinton candidacies did well. The heir-apparent, like the heiress-apparent, prospered until citizens actually voted.

Celebrity power presumed a flood of campaign cash, which became a trickle. Each campaign offered a brand name, but beyond "my turn" the message was unformed and untested. Inevitability and invincibility yielded to confusion, comebacks, and occasional panic. Both campaigns hurled kitchen sinks and any handy piece of pipe at opponents. The dynastic imperative also demanded an elastic attitude toward party rules.

After 1980, the Democratic Party revised its nomination rules, as it has done frequently since 1968. The Kennedy-Carter showdown gave birth to today's "superdelegates," politicians and party officials who are issued a free ticket to the convention to quell the quixotic tendencies of those chosen in primaries and caucuses. If the party's lords and ladies see delegates rushing to nominate an unelectable candidate, they're supposed to run into the streets and holler "Stop!"

Caution is difficult to impose upon a dynastic sense of destiny, with its defiance of precedent and arithmetic. Party rules? They're for the other guy. A 100-delegate or 150-delegate margin can be, in the words of eager surrogates, "a tie."

The 2008 Democratic contest is more historic than that of 1980, since it involves two of the party's core constituencies. Obama, whom Kennedy has endorsed, is the first black candidate with a serious chance to be president. Blacks form 20 percent of the party's base. Clinton, however, is part of its largest bloc, women, whom John Adams called in a 1776 letter to his wife, Abigail, a "tribe more numerous and powerful than all the rest."

Political dynasties are built on memories, which can help or hurt. Democrats under 40 may be flocking to Obama precisely because they have spent half their lives in the Bush-Clinton-Bush era. The last time any American voter saw a national ballot without a Bush or a Clinton was 1976.

In 1980, the Kennedy dynasty was still fresh in voters' minds. The first attempt at dynastic restoration ended tragically in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in June of 1968 where Senator Robert Kennedy of New York, after winning California's presidential primary, was assassinated.

Edward Kennedy declared his candidacy on Nov. 7, 1979, two weeks before Iranian street mobs captured US employees in the Tehran embassy. Neither Kennedy nor Carter could solve the hostage problem, but Carter was president and Kennedy was not, so Carter stopped campaigning and ducked debates. Kennedy's "big-state" strategy won California, New York, and Pennsylvania. Carter's "Rose Garden" strategy won most of the other contests.

The battle was bitter. Amid low poll ratings, a feisty Carter forecast victory to supporters in June of 1979. To his diary, Carter confided that Vice President Walter Mondale "thought my comment concerning 'whipping Kennedy's ass' was ill-advised. His is a kind of lonely voice. Some of my staff members say it was the best thing for morale around the White House since the Willie Nelson concert."

In August of 1980 in New York, Kennedy fought on. Although his aides had approved updated nomination rules in 1978, they sought to overturn the voters' verdict in primaries with "an open convention," allowing delegates to shed their pledges to candidates. Kennedy lost a rules-change roll call by 545 votes. He might not have been the beneficiary of doubts about Carter's chances. Pre-convention speculation about nominating former candidates Henry Jackson, Edmund Muskie, or Morris Udall was plentiful, if fanciful. "If nominated, I will run for the Mexican border," Udall said. "If elected, I will fight extradition."

Bickering infected Madison Square Garden. Harold Ickes, for 40 years the poet laureate of arcane party rules and bylaws, was then working for Kennedy. He invoked a rule that would delay Carter's re-nomination by six hours. The move delayed, but did not prevent, Carter's victory.

Ickes now works for Clinton. Last August, he voted for a Democratic National Committee rule to ban delegates from Michigan and Florida, whose early primaries violated party rules. On Jan. 25, after Clinton lost in Iowa, her campaign announced that her name would go on the Michigan ballot. In dynastic campaigns, rules are for others.

At the 1980 convention, Kennedy gave a stirring speech that many in the hall still remember. Carter's speech was less memorable. On the convention's closing night, Kennedy arrived with a grim smile, quickly shook Carter's hand and vanished into a rostrum scrum of party panjandrums.

Whether Kennedy's candidacy contributed to Democratic losses is uncertain. It didn't help. In November, Carter lost 43 states to Ronald Reagan, whose coattails broomed out dozens of Democrats, including the 34-year-old governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton.

In 1962, Kennedy ran for his first public office, the Senate seat vacated by his brother, John F. Kennedy. Since the president's election in 1960, the seat had been warmed by a family friend until the youngest Kennedy was 30, constitutionally eligible for the Senate. A dynastic struggle involved H. Stuart Hughes, the grandson of Charles Evans Hughes, Republican presidential nominee in 1916; and George Cabot Lodge, son of Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., defeated for the Senate by JFK in 1952, and great-grandson of Henry Cabot Lodge, who in 1916 defeated John F. "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, grandfather of John, Robert and Edward Kennedy.

The Commonwealth's political motto could well be "Dynasties R Us."

In the 1962 Democratic primary, Kennedy faced Edward McCormack Jr., state attorney general, former Boston city councilor, and nephew of US House Speaker John McCormack. "If his name was Edward Moore, with his qualifications, with your qualifications, Teddy, your candidacy would be a joke," McCormack said in a debate at South Boston High School.

Kennedy won and has represented Massachusetts ever since. Losing in 1980 was not only the best thing that happened to him, it also enhanced the reputation of the Kennedy dynasty and the US Senate. Historians will judge Kennedy one of the Senate's most diligent and effective members, not only in the past quarter-century, but in its entire history.

His example may inspire today's two talented senators. Hillary Clinton could use as senatorial role models both Kennedy and her immediate predecessor from New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. After 1980, Kennedy discovered what Clinton or Obama (or both, the way they're feuding) can learn: winning the White House isn't everything.

Martin F. Nolan reported on politics for The Boston Globe from 1961 to 2001.