Three Democratic clans mix uneasily

Political Memo

By Patrick Healy

updated 8:28 a.m. ET Aug. 26, 2008

DENVER - Neither family wanted it this way, neither the Kennedys nor the Clintons. But the opening of the Democratic convention on Monday brought a stark contrast: a bittersweet public celebration of the life of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who is suffering from brain cancer, and an embittered private drama about the terms on which the Clintons would yield the party to Senator Barack Obama.

Mr. Kennedy, who endorsed Mr. Obama in January, had hoped to lead a hearty, full-throated night of anointing the next generation. Instead, the tribute to him took on the weight of a farewell to the last of the storied Kennedy brothers, with an intensity that rivaled the excitement around Michelle Obama’s speech about the Democrats’ next standard-bearer, her husband.

As one political dynasty was celebrating its legacy and ceding the political stage on Monday night, the other dominant family of the Democratic Party was struggling to protect its legacy and accept its own exit from the spotlight. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bill Clinton had once hoped this convention would be theirs, an exultation of past and future Clinton White Houses. Instead, they were coming face to face with shrunken, supporting roles.

Frustrations abounded most pointedly for Mrs. Clinton: at a breakfast with New York Democrats on Monday morning, she was forced to rebut a new television advertisement for Senator John McCain that used her past attacks on Mr. Obama against him. And she faced questions about comments from Clinton friends that Mr. Clinton remained aggrieved from the bruising primary battle and was unhappy with his speaking assignment at the convention.

At one point she told aides the Obama campaign could end the bad blood with her husband by simply acknowledging his policy accomplishments and efforts at racial reconciliation in the 1990s — in amends for what the Clintons saw as a lack of respect from Mr. Obama during the primaries. One aide, recounting this conversation on Monday, observed that Mrs. Clinton was in an old role, looking out for her husband while trying to protect her own future.

As one Clinton fund-raiser put it in an interview on Monday, “Hillary often says that Bill isn’t a complicated person — the Obama people don’t have to do much to make peace with him.”

If the Obamas see soulmates among the Kennedys, they see the Clintons as, if not spoilers, then at heart a more complicated and tactical family.

The same could be said of the Kennedy-Clinton relationship. At the 1992 convention where he was nominated, in his biographical film, Mr. Clinton used the grainy footage of him meeting President John F. Kennedy at the White House as a teenager in 1963 to try to establish a natural progression. The two families became friendly (though not especially close) in the 1990s. Yet their bond was ruptured, badly, when Senator Kennedy endorsed Mr. Obama in January. The politics of Democratic torch-passing turned pained and personal.

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The Clintons and the Kennedys had brought glamour to one another on their much-photographed sailing trips off of Martha’s Vineyard years ago. That was over. Now the Obamas were bringing a fresh burst of glamour to the Kennedys, and the Kennedys were offering a fuller embrace to the Obamas than they ever gave the Clintons; Caroline Kennedy even signed on in a substantive role, helping Mr. Obama select his vice-presidential nominee, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr.

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