Kennedy Backs Obama

Jan 28, 08:40 PM

"Even in the darkest hours, I know what America can achieve," Kennedy said. "I've seen it. I've lived it _ and with Barack Obama, we can do it again."

With his youth, eloquence and barrier-breaking candidacy, Obama often stirs comparisons to President Kennedy. On a platform at American University, Obama was surrounded by two generations of Kennedys, including Caroline Kennedy, the late president's only living child, and Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., the Massachusetts senator's son, both of whom also spoke on behalf of Obama.

After he finished with his endorsement, Sen. Kennedy, the president's only surviving brother and the guardian of his political legacy, put his arms around Obama, drawing cheers from the ebullient, youthful crowd that filled the school's arena.

"I stand here with a great deal of humility," Obama said after the Kennedys spoke. "I know what your support means. I know the cherished place the Kennedy name holds in the hearts of the American people."

The endorsement reinforces the themes of hope and generational change at the heart of Obama's candidacy just as the presidential campaign becomes a truly national contest, with 22 states voting on Feb. 5.

Sen. Kennedy also is a hero in his own right to the Democratic Party's liberal wing, and his support offers reassurance of Obama's readiness for the presidency from one of the longest-serving and most respected Democrats in the Senate.

Plans call for Kennedy to campaign for Obama beginning late in the week in California, Arizona and New Mexico. Kennedy has strong ties to Latinos, a group that Obama has not done well with so far.

Obama also received the endorsement Monday of Toni Morrison, the Nobel Prize-winning author who once dubbed Bill Clinton "the first black president."

The Kennedy endorsement is a blow to Hillary Clinton. President Bill Clinton had styled himself a successor to John Kennedy in his presidential campaign, making prominent use of a boyhood picture showing Clinton shaking hands with President Kennedy. And the Clintons had maintained a friendship with Kennedy during Clinton's presidency, visiting Kennedy and sailing with him off Cape Cod.

But Sen. Clinton showed no disappointment at the endorsement of her rival. "We're all proud of the people we have endorsing us," she said in a conference call with reporters.

She was in Kennedy's home state on Monday, holding a rally in Springfield, Mass.

John Edwards, after a third-place finish in his native state of South Carolina over the weekend, laid out his "path to the nomination" in a memo his campaign released to reporters.

The strategy banks on ad campaigns in 10 Feb. 5 states _ including several of the "red" Republican-leaning states where Edwards has been pitching himself as the only Democrat with a shot to win in November _ and grass-roots pushes in the dozen other states that vote on Super Tuesday. It is to be bankrolled by Internet donations the campaign says have rolled in over the last month.

Kennedy's endorsement of Obama rested heavily on the themes of generational change.

"If we do not turn aside, if we dare to set our course for the shores of hope, we together will go beyond the divisions of the past and find our place to build the America of the future. My friends, I ask you to join in this historic journey _ to have the courage to choose change," Kennedy said.

"It is time again for a new generation of leadership," he continued. "It is time now for Barack Obama."

Though Kennedy included praise for the Clintons in his endorsement speech, he took some barely concealed swipes at the way they have conducted the presidential campaign.

Kennedy said Obama would "turn the page on the old politics of misrepresentation and distortion" and "close the book on the old politics of race against race, gender against gender, ethnic group against ethnic group, and straight against gay."

The Massachusetts senator recently contacted both Clintons to express his displeasure at criticism of Obama he considered to be over the line and Clinton campaign tactics that he felt were racially divisive.

American University was the site of one of President Kennedy's most famous speeches, his 1963 "Strategy of Peace" commencement address in which he called for a nuclear test ban treaty and an easing of Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union. Five months later, he was assassinated.

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