Opinion

CONJURING CAMELOT

Forty-eight years, some of them tear- stained, have passed since John F. Kennedy was elected president of the United States; now Barack Obama seems to wonder whether Camelot can be resurrected.

So yesterday he trundled out JFK’s little brother, Teddy; his daughter, Caroline, and his nephew, Patrick – venerable remnants of America’s once-upon-a-time royal family.

They were effusive in their praise of the junior senator from Illinois. And that may work for him – for myths endure, regardless of facts, and few more so than the Kennedy legend.

Yesterday, John Kennedy was extolled as an agent of change – and, in a sense, he was. He led a nation more or less at peace into the Vietnam War.

Robert F. Kennedy – who as US attorney general directed the FBI wiretapping of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. – was lionized as a champion of justice, and of the downtrodden.

And Teddy Kennedy – now 75 and first elected to the US Senate in 1962 – was presented as a vital agent of “change.”

Yet the senator was a bitter opponent of perhaps the most refreshing – and successful – change of the 1990s: welfare reform.

He’s against the most promising public-education reform to come down the pike in decades – school choice.

And he hasn’t had a fresh idea on national security since George McGovern ran for president in 1972.

It’s true that the Teddy Kennedy wing of the Democratic Party didn’t have much use for Bill Clinton – especially after his welfare-reform triumph in 1996. Indeed, Kennedy himself called the bill “legislative child abuse.”

Today there is near-universal consensus that those reforms have lifted millions from poverty – real change, as it were.

Once there was a time when many Americans believed in Camelot; 48 years ago, it was easy.

But time and truth have tattered the myth, Teddy Kennedy’s ahistorical recollections notwithstanding.

Camelot died a long time ago.