link

I would suspect reservations might now be in order if you want to get in.

Kennedy confidantes told the Globe today that the Bay State's senior senator will appear with Obama and Kennedy's niece, Caroline Kennedy, at a morning rally at American University in Washington tomorrow to announce his support.

link

This year, both Groundhog Day and the State of the Union Address fall on the same day.

As Air America Radio pointed out: It is an ironic juxtaposition:

One involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to a creature of little intelligence for prognostication, and the other involves a Groundhog.

Ha.

Here is the link to the article:

http://www.boston.com/news/pol...

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes...

During Mr. Obama's three years in the Senate, he has worked to build allies and gain friendships with many of his colleagues. While Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Obama have not been particularly close, Mr. Obama quickly gained the admiration of the Kennedy family.

It was on a November day in 2005, near the end of Mr. Obama's first year in the Senate, when he was asked to deliver a keynote address at a ceremony commemorating the 80th birthday of Robert F. Kennedy. The invitation was extended by Ethel Kennedy, whom at the time referred to Mr. Obama as "our next president."

"I think he feels it. He feels it just like Bobby did," Mrs. Kennedy told me that day, comparing her late husband's quest for social justice to Mr. Obama's. "He has the passion in his heart. He's not selling you. It's just him."

Regardless of whether you feel Kennedy is too liberal or not, nobody can deny that Ted Kennedy loves this country dearly. This is a big deal for him to step out and campaign actively. He will have an impact in MA, NJ, NY and CA.

A source inside the Obama campaign says the candidate's web site has seen one of its best hours tonight, raising $525,000 in one hour. A senior aide inside the Obama campaign said the candidate's site saw its "highest peak" tonight in both online donations and traffic, "bigger than after Iowa, bigger than after New Hampshire."

The Obama campaign measures online donations every 15 minutes, and the source said that online money was pouring in at the rate of more than $500,000 per hour.

To donate, please click here.  

http://my.barackobama.com/page...

I thin a 28 point win should be worth a decent bounce in the polls.

The Kennedy endorsement is likely to give Obama a lift among Hispanic voters because of Kennedy's passionate advocacy of immigration legislation. The Obama campaign, which lags far behind Clinton among Hispanic voters in national polls, is likely to prominently display the endorsements by both Kennedys in Latino communities.

The disclosure also comes the same weekend that the House's highest-ranking Latino, California Rep. Xavier Becerra, also announced that he is backing Obama.

How do you think it's going to play on Eddie Sotelo's (photographed up top with the Senate's liberal lion at an immigration reform event last June) top-rated nationally-syndicated Spanish-language radio show out of Los Angeles, El Piolín, where Teddy is a regular guest and revered hero, when he explains how Obama came to his aid on the Immigration Reform Bill in a fight that "the other presidential candidates avoided"? (Want to know how outrageous that is? It's 100 percent true! ¡Verdad, carnal! Eddie, cue up the mic. An old friend is coming to visit.)

Add Massachusetts Congressman Bill Delahunt, one of if not the leading congressional advocate for human rights in Latin America, Mexiphile and frequent unofficial diplomatic envoy to Mexico

Teddy is the old lion of the Democratic party -- one of the few politicians who still keeps fighting and passing significant legislation all the time even after so many decades inside the Beltway.  Just as importantly, he can connect Obama with the legacy of JFK and RFK.  

Finally, the timing could not be better for Obama -- on the heels of a big win that put him back in connection, and only 10 days before Super Tuesday.  In a close race, this is the kind of thing that could tip the scales.

(from Wikipedia) Theodore Chaikin "Ted" Sorensen (born May 8, 1928) is of Counsel (retired Senior Partner) at the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP and writer, best known as President John F. Kennedy's Special Counsel & Adviser, legendary speechwriter, and "alter-ego." President Kennedy once called him his "intellectual blood bank."

Barack Obama: the new JFK

Theodore Sorensen

The Guardian
July 25, 2007

At first glance, the Democratic nominee for president in 1960, John Fitzgerald Kennedy - the millionaire Caucasian war hero for whom I worked for 11 golden years - seems notably different from the most interesting candidate for next year's nomination, Senator Barack Obama. But when does a difference make a difference? Different times, issues, and electors make any meaningful comparison unlikely. But the parallels in their candidacies are striking.

Fifty years ago, Kennedy and I embarked on a period in which we travelled to all 50 states in his long, uphill quest for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination. He was, like Obama, a first-term US senator. But he was not yet 40 years old, making Obama, already 45, a geezer by comparison.

At the time, Washington pundits assumed Kennedy had at least two insurmountable obstacles. The first was his lack of experience, especially compared with the senior statesmen also seeking that nomination - Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Adlai Stevenson and Stuart Symington. Kennedy acknowledged that his age and inexperience would turn away some voters. Obama, though older than Kennedy, is similarly dismissed by some today. But Kennedy noted in one speech that "experience is like tail-lights on a boat which illuminate where we have been when we should be focusing on where we should be going".

Kennedy's second major obstacle was his heritage. Some said he had lost his chance to be president of the United States the day he was born - or, at least, the day he was baptised as a Roman Catholic. No Catholic had ever been elected president of the United States, and the overwhelming defeat suffered by the only Catholic nominated for that position, Governor Al Smith of New York in 1928, had persuaded subsequent Democratic leaders that it would be hopeless ever to risk that route again. The conviction that no Catholic could win was greater, in that less enlightened era 50 years ago, than the widespread assumption today that a black presidential candidate cannot win. The subtly bigoted phrase most often repeated in that election year - by former president Harry Truman, among others - was that 1960 was "too early" for a Catholic president, that the country was "not ready," and that Kennedy should be a "good sport" by settling for the vice-presidency. No doubt Obama will hear - or has already heard - similar sentiments about the colour of his skin.

Even some Catholic religious leaders - who thought Kennedy was not Catholic enough, having attended secular schools and expressed disagreement with the Catholic hierarchy on church-state separation - opposed his candidacy. So did some Catholic political leaders, who thought his candidacy might raise unwanted controversies or produce an unwanted rival to their own positions (much as Al Sharpton and Vernon Jordan may not initially welcome an Obama candidacy). But, in time, Kennedy's speeches and interviews strongly favoring traditional church-state separation reassured all but the most bigoted anti-Catholics. In the end, despite his ethnic handicap, Kennedy proved to be less divisive than his major opponent, fellow senator Hubert Humphrey. Obama may prove the same.

In addition to their similar handicaps, Kennedy and Obama share an extraordinary number of parallels. Both men were Harvard-educated. Both rose to national attention almost overnight as the result of starring roles at the nationally televised Democratic convention preceding their respective candidacies: Kennedy in 1956, when he delivered the speech nominating Stevenson and subsequently came close to winning an open-floor struggle for the vice-presidential nomination with Estes Kefauver; Obama in 2004, by virtue of his brilliant speech to the convention that year in Boston.

Both also gained national acclaim through their best-selling inspirational books - Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, published in 1956, and Obama's The Audacity of Hope, published in 2006. Both men immediately stood out as young, handsome, and eloquent new faces who attracted and excited ever larger and younger crowds at the grassroots level, a phenomenon that initially went almost unnoticed by Washington leaders and experts too busy interviewing themselves.

Kennedy's speeches in early 1960 and even earlier, like Obama's in early 2007, were not notable for their five-point legislative plans. Rather, they focused on several common themes: hope, a determination to succeed despite the odds, dissatisfaction with the status quo, and confidence in the judgment of the American people. In sprinkling their remarks with allusions to history and poetry, neither talked down to the American people. JFK was so frank about his disagreements with the leadership of his Catholic "base" that one Catholic journal editorialised against him. Obama was equally frank and courageous with the Democrats' organized labor base in assessing the competitive prospects of the American auto industry in Detroit. Both were unsparing in their references to the "revolving door" culture in Washington.

On foreign policy, both emphasised the importance of multilateral democracy, national strength as a guardian of peace, and the need to restore America's global standing, moral authority, and leadership. Both warned of the dangers of war: Kennedy motivated by his own harsh experience in world war two, Obama by his familiarity with suffering in all parts of the world. Both were cerebral rather than emotional speakers, relying on the communication of values and hope rather than cheap applause lines.

Perhaps most tellingly, both preached (and personified) the politics of hope in contrast to the politics of fear, which characterised Republican speeches during their respective eras. In 1960 and earlier, cynics and pessimists accepted the ultimate inevitability of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, much as today they assume a fruitless and unending war against terrorism. Hope trumped fear in 1960, and I have no doubt that it will again in 2008.

Although President Kennedy became the breakthrough president on civil rights, health care, and other liberal issues, he was not the most liberal candidate for the nomination in 1960. His emphasis on the importance of ethics, moral courage, and a multilateral foreign policy made him - like Obama - hard to pigeonhole with a single ideological label. His insistence that the United States "must do better" in every sphere of activity, including its cold war competition with the Soviet Union, caused some historians to mistakenly recall that he "ran to the right" of Richard Nixon on national security issues, forgetting his emphasis on negotiations and peaceful solutions.

JFK's establishment opponents - probably not unlike Obama's - did not understand Kennedy's appeal. "Find out his secret," LBJ instructed one of his aides sent to spy on the Kennedy camp, "his strategy, his weaknesses, his comings and goings". Ultimately, Kennedy was both nominated and elected, not by secretly outspending or out-gimmicking his opponents but by outworking and out-thinking them, especially by attracting young volunteers and first-time voters. Most of Kennedy's opponents, like Obama's, were fellow senators who initially dismissed him as neither a powerhouse on the senate floor nor a member of their inner circle. That mattered not to the voters, nor does it today.

Above all, after eight years out of power and two bitter defeats, Democrats in 1960, like today, wanted a winner - and Kennedy, despite his supposed handicaps, was a winner. On civil rights, the Cuban missile crisis, the race to the moon, and other issues, President Kennedy succeeded by demonstrating the same courage, imagination, compassion, judgment, and ability to lead and unite a troubled country that he had shown during his presidential campaign. I believe Obama will do the same.

Democrats said the endorsement will help Obama with traditional Democratic groups where Clinton has been strong - union households, Hispanics and downscale workers.

and this:

"This is the biggest Democratic endorsement Obama could possibly get short of Bill Clinton," said a high-level Democrat.

The Clinton campaign launched a last-ditch effort over the last few days to stop Kennedy's move, orchestrating a flood of phone calls to Kennedy from sources ranging from union chiefs to his Massachusetts constituents.

The former president also called Kennedy in a vain attempt to keep him out of the race, a source familiar with the conversation said.

During his two terms in the White House, President Clinton made repeated overtures to the Kennedy family. So the senator's rejection of his wife is at least as embarrassing as her 28-point loss in the South Carolina primary on Saturday.

The Democratic caucuses hold more potential for high drama in the presidential race, with Colorado voters split evenly between Barack Obama at 34 percent and Hillary Rodham Clinton at 32 percent - well within the poll's 3.5 percentage-point margin of error. John Edwards was the choice of 17 percent of likely caucus-goers. Fourteen percent said they were still undecided.

Obama's strength in Colorado may come from the fact that the state's Democrats see the desire for change as a driving ssue in the campaign. The poll showed 51 percent of Democrats see change as more important than experience - and the ability to bring change is a trait they overwhelmingly associate with the Illinois senator.