Throughout this primary, there's been very little I could bank on. Certainly not my preference in candidates. THat changed with the tides. Not the preferences of my friends, or the voters. The candidates themselves shifted and shimmered and changed, and so did the campaigns they ran. But there was one thing I could count on: My grandmother did not like Barack Obama. Not one little bit. No sir. Yesterday, she told me she voted for him. There were a couple of reasons. One, "it's your generation's turn. We've screwed everything up. Now you get a chance." That, alone, though, wasn't enough. "I think it's terrible how that Mr. Clinton acted." My grandmother still admires and respects Hillary, but Bil's behavior has alienated her from the Clinton campaign. "It's just terrible," she said. And, finally, "I read Caroline Kennedy's endorsement, and if her and Ted Kennedy are endorsing, he must be okay." On some level, family members are the cab drivers of electoral politics, the folks media types turn to because they let us into their thinking, while the rest of the electorate remains stubbornly opaque. It's a crude stand-in, though, so take it with a grain of salt. But though the Caroline Kennedy endorsement meant nothing to me, it does eem to have mattered to generations above mine. It mattered to my grandmother, and my mother. A friend told me, yesterday, that he knew a woman who'd been a Hillary fundraiser, and flipped after Kennedy's stand: "It was like getting a permission slip to be idealistic again," she said. I didn't even read it closely. But one generation up, it seems to have mattered greatly, and to judge from the coverage of Ted Kennedy's endorsement (Kennedy, like my grandmother, appears to have been pushed over to the early endorsement by anger at Bill Clinton's role in the primary), his imprimatur will have an impact, as well. Which is why I'm off to see his endorsement at AU in a couple of minutes. Will have more from there a bit later in the day.
