Get Ready for KKT

Jay Nordlinger

The "next Kennedy."

She is, they say, the "next Kennedy"-the member of the clan who will emerge as torchbearer for what the Kennedys and their enthusiasts like to call "The Dream." What is "The Dream"? You know: kindness to black people; reverence for nature; contempt for Republicans; that sort of thing. After the death of JFK's son in July, a nostalgia for what was praiseworthy about "Camelot" enveloped the nation. There was even some talk that this "next Kennedy" might make a vice-presidential running mate for Al Gore. She is not quite ready for the big time; but she is getting there, fairly quickly.

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is lieutenant governor of Maryland-not exactly a glamour position, but one from which she is impressing Democrats around the country. She is the eldest grandchild of old Joe and Rose Kennedy, the first child of Robert and Ethel Kennedy. She is the first Kennedy woman to have stood for office; the first Kennedy of either flavor to have lost a general election; the first Kennedy of her generation known to have departed, even a smidgen, from orthodox left- liberalism. She is that rare thing-a true "New Democrat," distinguishable from Old ones like her Uncle Ted. The journalist and sometimes-Anonymous novelist Joe Klein has dubbed her "the best and the brightest of the young Kennedys." This may not strike you as towering praise, but it is worth a lot in certain circles.

KKT, as she is known (the finest Kennedys have swell initials), is far from your average Kennedy kid. She is sometimes referred to as "the un- Kennedy," or "Clean Kathleen." When she was younger, her brothers, apparently appalled by her concern for virtue, mocked her as "The Nun." Everyone who knows her remarks on how normal she is, not just for a Kennedy, but for anyone. The near-universal opinion is that she is friendly, humble, and thoroughly decent. She has a wide-eyed desire for good government and good citizenship that recalls a more innocent time. Her late cousin, JFK Jr., labeled a couple of his other RFK cousins "poster boys for bad behavior." Kathleen, as even her Republican opponents are happy to concede, is a poster girl for good behavior.

She was born on the Fourth of July in 1951, named after one of her aunts, Kathleen "Kick" Kennedy, who had died in a plane crash. She was 12 when her uncle, the president, was killed. Her father, the attorney general, wrote her a famous letter about her responsibility to her family and country. Framed and displayed in her home, it is a subject of everything written about her. In 1968, just before she turned 17, her father, too, was killed. She conducted herself-then and subsequently-with exemplary poise and dignity.

Kathleen went to Radcliffe, where she fell in love with a graduate student, David Townsend. After they married, they moved to New Mexico, where he taught at St. John's College in Santa Fe and she attended the University of New Mexico Law School. They were a couple who belonged to the age: He made her wedding ring; they used natural childbirth, at home; they buried the placenta under a tree-a southwestern tradition, so they claim. Kathleen began to practice "environmental law," when everyone on the left and his brother were doing it. Later, in Massachusetts, she managed one of Ted Kennedy's reelection campaigns and worked in the state government under Michael Dukakis. In 1984, the Townsends moved to Maryland. He joined the faculty of St. John's, Annapolis; she began her political career in earnest.

KKT ran for Congress in 1986. She had not been reared to consider herself a potential officeholder-that was for the boys. Only slowly had it dawned on her that she could. Her campaign, of course, made national news, as she jogged from house to house in her tennis shoes, the very image of exuberant Democratic activism. She was rather awkward and ungainly, indifferent to her appearance. Detractors called her dowdy, and worse. Her speaking style was cause for derision as well: high- pitched and flighty. At first, she tried to go straight, calling herself Kathleen Townsend. When it became clear that she needed her middle name, she hauled it out, in a big way. She got thumped in November-but she has clung to the "Kennedy" ever since.

After her defeat, KKT burrowed in the Maryland Department of Education. There, she hit on one of her signature issues: "character education." Dismayed at what was, really, the triumph of secular liberalism in the classroom, she called for the reinstatement of values-even morals, if you please. In a 1990 article for The Washington Monthly, a "neoliberal" (or New Democrat) journal, she attacked a teacher's guide put out by the National Education Association that condemned "attempts to inculcate a set of given virtues," such as the Boy Scout's code. She also blasted an educationist who criticized the concept of honoring parents, and another who associated patriotism with the Third Reich. "These comments are typical of the ideas your children's teachers are trained on," she fumed. "Do we really want our kids to revile Boy Scouts, abandon family ties, and believe that character-building is for Nazis?"

As she has assailed a lack of discipline and "moral collapse," Townsend has often sounded like that liberal bete noire William J. Bennett-a fact with which she is obviously uncomfortable. "Before you dismiss [character education] as a William Bennettesque ploy . . .," she once felt compelled to say. Being a Kennedy, evidently, means never having to eat at the same table as the Right.

When Bill Clinton was elected president, Townsend went to work in the Justice Department, as a mid-level employee, but in 1994 she got the call from Parris Glendening to be his running mate in Maryland. Her job, mainly, was to attract black support and raise money. Her magnetic cousin John held three fundraisers for the ticket. KKT was, for the most part, confined to the sidelines, still a hazardous speaker and a clumsy campaigner. The Democrats won in a squeaker, amid (credible) Republican cries of voter fraud. KKT became instantly the most famous lieutenant governor in the country.

Over the next four years, Townsend developed into, if not quite a swan, a perfectly presentable politician. Off came her heavy glasses; in went contact lenses. She acquired a smart hairstyle and stylish clothes. She seems to have received some speech training. She submitted to this makeover not because she suffered from insecurities, but because her appearance had become a distraction-women, in particular, had tended to be cutting about her. Even spruced up, however, Townsend had a bit of trouble gaining respect: Many snickered at her as a "lightweight," an "airhead," a "scatterbrain." Some in the legislature named her "The Space Cadet." Her defenders, however, say that her enthusiasm and guilelessness must not be mistaken for ditziness-she is a gregarious and open woman with a serious mind.

In the 1998 reelection campaign, Townsend was no longer a bit player, but the leading lady: Glendening leaned on her heavily. She smoothed over relations with the White House when the governor had the bad taste to criticize Clinton for perjury and degeneracy. The ticket also played the race card in a gross and scandalous manner, portraying the Republican nominee as all but a cross-burner. The Democrats won again, this time by a comfortable margin, with no need of cheating.

KKT is the ultimate "goo goo," or good-government, type. She is the kind of person who is forever calling on others to be "involved." (Scarcely can she speak a sentence without using the word two or three times.) She has a missionary's zeal about government and citizenship.

She is a fervent proponent of voluntarism and "community service." Almost daily she recycles that quotation falsely attributed to Tocqueville, about how America is great because it is good. While a proud, and often a sharply partisan, Democrat, she does not regard herself as ideological, but rather as "results-driven." She is pro- choice on abortion and in favor of capital punishment.

Assigned the role of Maryland anti-crime czar, she has been notably hardline. She has championed something called the Police Corps, patterned after the Peace Corps and ROTC: In return for scholarships, students pledge to serve four years as policemen. She is as likely to emphasize the necessity of punishment as the sadness of "root causes." As an anti-drug warrior, she is implacable, clearly motivated by her brothers' (well-publicized) struggles with addiction.

And the language she uses can be striking, coming from a Democrat- especially one who has spent her summers in Hyannisport. She speaks of "very high standards" and "children of God" and "the shame [shame!] of lifelong welfare dependency" and "the dignity of work" and "the very dangerous path" that is racial separatism. They call her the un- Kennedy, but, in a way, she is more original Kennedy than un-, standing for a JFK-like liberalism that has little time for kookery and nostrums.

The Kennedys, like the Tafts, have come down somewhat in the world. They have Teddy in the Senate, of course, and his snotty son Patrick in the House. Mark Shriver, son of Eunice, is in the Maryland legislature. And then there is KKT. There is a good deal of "rising star" chatter about her. She is close to Gore, for whom she has already visited New Hampshire, twice. (The Kennedy name remains extra-mesmerizing in the Northeast.) She is almost certain to run for governor in 2002, and, in the invincibly Democratic state of Maryland, she will win. Then she will be a national force. Liberals will at last have a Kennedy they can admire without guilt. And the rest of us? We will have a Kennedy we do not have to abhor.

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