1/ From Michelle Cottle’s “External Flame,” at The New Repub­lic this week:

[T]his alliance may be an even shrewder move for [Car­o­line] Kennedy Schloss­berg than for [Barack] Obama. It’s been 45 years since the fall of Camelot, and the family brand has begun to fade. A grow­ing por­tion of the elec­torate was born after the deaths of John and Bobby and has a tough time relat­ing to the Kennedy fix­a­tion of its elders. Under such con­di­tions, what’s a com­mit­ted cus­to­dian of the family legacy to do? Hitch her clan’s wagon to the hottest polit­i­cal star in decades. With a little luck, even as that old Camelot magic rubs off on Obama, the candidate’s energy and rel­e­vance will help sus­tain the Kennedy brand for a little longer.

2/ From my Feb­ru­ary Chicago Tri­bune arti­cle (PDF) on the Kennedy Obama endorsements:

The Kennedy name is the gold stan­dard in Demo­c­ra­tic pol­i­tics, and it will remain so as long as John Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion is a part of living memory. But the youngest people to vote for him in 1960 are 68 today, and seven out of eight Amer­i­cans are too young to remem­ber him as any­thing more than a his­tor­i­cal figure, no more or less real than Roo­sevelt, Lin­coln or Jefferson.

Edward Kennedy him­self is 75. Besides his son, no third-​generation Kennedy holds national office.

And thus, when Kennedy said Obama would not be trapped by the pat­terns of the past, it might not be because he was com­i­cally or trag­i­cally unaware of his own or his family’s posi­tion. It might be exactly the oppo­site: Per­haps he was too aware of that posi­tion. If that’s the case, then last week’s endorse­ments should be seen as an acknowl­edg­ment of just how frag­ile the pat­terns of the past can be.

By mid­night Tues­day [i.e. Feb­ru­ary 5], after more than 20 states have weighed in on the Obama-​Clinton race, we’ll have a better sense of how the Kennedy cal­cu­lus affects the elec­tion in the
short run….

But in the long run, I wouldn’t be sur­prised if the endorse­ments do as much to help the Kennedys as they do to help Obama. Cast­ing Obama in the Kennedy mold offers him author­ity, but it also offers the Kennedys a future, a way to keep the mys­tique alive.

QUICK UPDATE (7/1): Don’t worry, the irony is not lost on me.