Teddy 2
Another Teddy K. story. Actually, this one’s more about me.
I had lived on Martha’s Vineyard for four years when the Mitt Romney/Ted Kennedy Senate race in 1994 heated up. “Heated up” is a relative term: everyone knew, at every moment, that Teddy was going to win. The questions of the election were how foolish Romney could make Teddy look and how much money he could spend doing it.
I had never heard of Romney before the election. All I knew was that he was upsetting the standing order. I liked the idea of that, especially because I still felt like the outsider at school. Everyone around me blindly supported Teddy, and here was this intellectual guy coming out of nowhere to challenge everything they believed. I bought it, hook, line, and sinker.
There were a couple things to remember here: one, I couldn’t vote yet, so my stand was all for show; and two, if I could have voted, I probably would have voted for Kennedy. I do not think, even at the age of 16, the few rebellious bones in my body would have allowed me to vote against a Kennedy. But as I was two years away from voting age, I was free to act out on my impulses.
I can’t remember now what Romney’s platform was, as I keep confusing it with Steve Forbes’ Flat Tax run for President. All I know was that I angered some students, was a curiousity to others, and seriously annoyed some of the parents of my friends to whom I mouthed off. It’s one thing to knock the Kennedy religion; it’s another to do so when you’re 16 years old and brash about it. Hadn’t my mom raised me right?
In retrospect, she had. That flirtation — a period identifying with politics based on a gut feeling, rather than an appreciation of the complexities of the issues, the complexities of the job, and the weight and importance of history — was good to get out of my system. I’ll also say that I don’t begrudge anyone who was a Romney supporter based on all the issues raised above — I just know that I wasn’t. I was practicing a politics that I’ve never rekindled, and I’m happy I got to do it at such a young age.
But my message to Teddy is this: no matter what I said, I would have voted for you. And when you beat Romney by 17 points, your “smallest” margin of victory ever, I realized that what I didn’t know about politicis could fill the high school cafeteria. I didn’t see it as a close race. I saw it as a thumping. Once I set out to learn what I hadn’t know before, I started to learn about the dream that’ll never die by my ballot.
