Fundamental shift for Democrats?

David Brooks:

Something fundamental has shifted in the Democratic Party.

Last week there was the widespread revulsion at the Clintons’ toxic attempts to ghettoize Barack Obama. In private and occasionally in public, leading Democrats lost patience with the hyperpartisan style of politics — the distortion of facts, the demonizing of foes, the secret admiration for brass-knuckle brawling and the ever-present assumption that it’s necessary to pollute the public sphere to win. All the suppressed suspicions of Clintonian narcissism came back to the fore. Are these people really serving the larger cause of the Democratic Party, or are they using the party as a vehicle for themselves?

And then Monday, something equally astonishing happened. A throng of Kennedys came to the Bender Arena at American University in Washington to endorse Obama. Caroline Kennedy evoked her father. Senator Edward Kennedy’s slightly hunched form carried with it the recent history of the Democratic Party.

The Kennedy endorsements will help among working-class Democrats, Catholics and the millions of Americans who have followed Caroline’s path to maturity. Furthermore, here was Senator Kennedy, the consummate legislative craftsman, vouching for the fact that Obama is ready to be president on Day One.

...


Maybe. Perhaps it was just a recognition that the unfair attacks were not working anymore and it was time to jump on a new train.

Obama certainly seized the opportunity and had not let it go even last night at the State of the Union address where he seemed to be attached to Kennedy's hip. But when it cames to changing politics he flunked with his criticism of the President's speech. It was criticism without substance or alternatives. It was criticism for criticism's sake. It was old time politics that was indistinguishable from that of Kennedy or Clinton. It reminded me of his foolish and ignorant statements about the Anbar awakening in Iraq.

Underneath the soaring rhetoric there is a lack of substance. Eventually others will notice.

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