Political dynasties are undemocratic
EDDIE MCCORMACK was right. During the 1962 Massachusetts Senate race that pitted the highly respected state attorney general against the young and inexperienced Ted Kennedy, McCormack famously declared that his opponent’s candidacy would be considered “a joke’’ if his name were Edward Moore.
Kennedy, of course, went on to win the race easily, and he served in the US Senate with great distinction for nearly five decades.
Nevertheless, McCormack’s insightful observation still resonates. In 1962, Ted Kennedy had had a brief stint as a Suffolk assistant district attorney. Anyone but a Kennedy with a resume that thin would have been roundly ridiculed and dismissed on the spot.
Which raises a larger issue: Just because a person possesses a famous last name doesn’t automatically qualify them for high public office. Indeed, the very notion should be viewed as anathema to anyone who cares deeply about democracy and its future.
Our country was founded on the principle that it doesn’t matter who your parents are or what social station in life you come from. What counts is what you, as an individual, can contribute to society through your own demonstrated gifts and accomplishments.
This was precisely what President Abraham Lincoln was getting at in his Gettysburg Address of 1863 when he stated that the nation was “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.’’
It should naturally follow that Old World notions of aristocratic privilege and status do not apply here. Yet longstanding American family political dynasties ranging from the Adamses to the Tafts to the Kennedys have always seemed to mock this egalitarian dictum.
These dynasties presumptuously assume - and history sadly confirms this - that it is birthright that counts above all else.
In Massachusetts, we have been extremely fortunate. As it happens, the Adamses, Lodges, and Kennedys have all made important - some might even say, vital - contributions to our Commonwealth and to the nation as a whole.
But who is to say that our string of luck will hold if we rush to vote for a Kennedy in the upcoming special election? Political brand loyalty should not trump consideration of individual competence and merit.
Just look at what the past eight years brought with George W. Bush. A spectacularly unsuccessful businessman and all-purpose screw-up throughout most of his adult life, the younger Bush was able to parlay his presidential dad’s powerful political connections into two disastrous terms in the White House. Two bloody foreign wars, a ballooning budget deficit, and a collapsed economy later, we are still reeling from the aftereffects of his failed presidency.
Voters are, of course, free to reject candidates who come from multigenerational political families. But a fixation on last names gives less-than-worthy members of those families too easy a route into office - and drives out candidates who have to stand on their own merits. Political dynasties are undemocratic because they take away the very thing that distinguishes our republican experiment above all others: choice.
As Eddie McCormack would no doubt agree, this is no laughing matter.
Thomas J. Whalen, an associate professor of social science at Boston University, is the author of “Kennedy Versus Lodge: The 1952 Massachusetts Senate Race.’’ 