From The Wall Street Journal: “In a scene reminiscent of ‘Weekend at Bernie’s,’ Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren and a retinue of other Democratic celebs gathered on Friday to prop up Martha Coakley’s ailing campaign for Massachusetts governor, at Boston’s Park Plaza Hotel.”
Prediction: As goes Martha Coakley, so goes Hillary.
New England was quite a place in the Sixties. Jack Kennedy and his brothers had commandeered the day, Bob Dylan was on stage with his wooden guitar in Newport, the beautiful young Joan Baez draped to his side, Cambridge was on fire with clenched fist revolution, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Swami Satchidananda (the “Woodstock guru”) were on hand and so were Ram Dass and Timothy Leary, still professors at Harvard. Then it spread, here, there and everywhere.
{mosads}And that perhaps is key to what they mean today when they talk about “Clinton Democrats.” When Bill Clinton went to the presidency, he did not try to balance his team regionally as John F. Kennedy did by bringing in the Texan Lyndon Johnson, as Reagan would by bringing in New Englander George H.W. Bush. He brought in another Southerner, old school too by family tradition, Al Gore of Tennessee. Because it was no longer about where you were from, that made no difference to them. It was about a generation and they were from the Sixties. It was about where you were in 1962. And Gore was at a New England Ivy League college with his roommate Tommy Lee Jones. There was even a very famous if not sickenly mawkish novel about Harvard student life, “Love Story,” which became a marker of the times, penned by the same author who had written the screenplay for the movie for “Yellow Submarine,” a Beatles fantasy.
To hear the way Coakley speaks the name “Bill Clinton” — head gently tilting, eyes panning upward — you will understand.
But seasons pass and at the end, the last loyalists will attempt to stage a revival. And that becomes the work of Kafka, as some of his great works are those of people whom time has left behind but are still among us, playing the old songs.
They wheel out today Gloria Steinem and Carole King, so popular in the day. And in Vermont, just across the river from where I live, they forever reenact the original moment, much as the Civil War is regularly reenacted in Roanoke, Va. Vermont Public Radio, pleading for cash, will invariably feature Sixties icons like Peter, Paul and Mary and even clips from the earthy Newport Folk Festivals of 1964 and 1965. But if you weren’t there then, it just seems strange.
The young today play DotA (Defense of the Ancients), read Neil Gaiman and admire Edward Snowden. They don’t know who Carole King is.
The sea has changed. The Kennedy era, from which the Sixties rose, has passed. William Weld, archetypal brahman type, was one of Massachusetts’s most popular governors. Mormon Mitt Romney did all right as well, and the very popular and possibly the most representative figure rising today in Yankee land is Sen. Elizabeth Warren, hard scrabble Jacksonian Okie from Muskogee (well, Oklahoma City).
And half of us like Neil Young have had lives since and can hardly remember as far back as 1962.
Quigley is a prize-winning writer who has worked more than 35 years as a book and magazine editor, political commentator and reviewer. For 20 years he has been an amateur farmer, raising Tunis sheep and organic vegetables. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife and four children. Contact him at quigley1985@gmail.com.