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Former Connecticut US Senator Chris Dodd, retired from politics since 2010, was and is a John F. Kennedy liberal Democrat. The breed is fast diminishing.
Dodd remembers the exact moment he decided to leave politics.
“On Dec. 24, 2009, Dodd, then 65, was looking back on one of his hardest years in politics — and ahead to the prospect of an uncertain reelection in 2010,” CTMirror tells us. Dodd’s approval rating that year had plummeted and he was looking ahead to a grueling reelection.
Finding he had some time to kill before boarding a flight to Connecticut from Washington DC, Dodd decided to visit former US Senator Ted Kennedy’s grave for the first time. “His resting place is marked by a simple cross and a flat stone, and a pathway linking his grave to his brother’s had not been built yet.
“‘I couldn’t find it,’ Dodd said. ‘And I’m sitting there, and all of a sudden I said to myself, “Do you want to do this for seven more years?” And I said, “No, that’s enough.” That’s how long it took. That’s how much conversation I had about it. And I got on the plane, went home, and I told Jackie and the kids. I said, ‘That’s enough.’”
Dodd and President Joe Biden were very close friends over the years. “On Sunday, July 21, while vacationing in Ireland, where Dodd has owned a cottage for 30 years in rural Galway, the younger of Dodd’s two college-aged daughters showed him a news alert on her phone: Biden was out,” According to the CTMirror account.
“Dodd did not share how he took the news. But he and Biden, both proud of their Irish ancestry, share an affinity for the poetry of William Butler Yeats, who once wrote of prominent friends now gone, “Think where man’s glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends.”
Perhaps Yeats’ rightly famous poem “The Second Coming” may be more appropriate to mark the end of a now passed political alliance recollected in tranquility:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Yeats rarely wrote for his contemporaries. “The moment” is the province of ink-stained wretches, not poets, who write for the ages.
In CTMirror’s telling, “Dodd said Thursday he recently was reminded that he then took the unusual step of praising the GOP nominee, Sen. Robert Dole of Kansas, the decorated and grievously wounded World War II veteran,” during a political address.
“’So let me say to Senator Robert Dole, on behalf of the thousands here in this United Center, thank you from a generation of Americans living in freedom because of your sacrifices,’ Dodd said.
“The remark, and by extension Dole, got a standing ovation from the Democrats.
“Last week, before heading for the airport and the Dominican Republic, Dodd laughed as he recounted the moment. ‘I’m thinking [to] myself, you know, boy, things have changed.’”
Yes indeed. The change is not incidental, a matter of momentary bad manners. Bill Buckle4y once said, “The trouble with bad manners is that they sometime lead to murder.”
The political changes in the United States, and elsewhere in the world, touch upon the very nature of states and mankind. In bombing Ukraine, proto-Stalinist Premier of Russia Vladimir Putin is not merely being impolite, nor is Iran’s maximum leader, nor are the pro-Hamas, pro-Iranian anarchists and democracy cannibals prowling the precincts of the Democrat National Convention in Chicago.
Of these, Biden said in his concluding remarks, “Those protesters out in the streets, they have a point. A lot of innocent people are being killed on both sides.”
Yeats was much closer to the scalding truth. From the middle 20th into the 21st century, some center pole of civilization has collapsed.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
In a less melancholic and more candid moment, Dodd, whose political manners are impeccable, might have agreed that this year’s Democrat National Convention is an unconventional convention like no other, if only because Biden, who had been chosen as a presidential candidate by 14 million primary voters was displaced at the last moment by Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris, a relative political unknown who had not a single primary vote to her credit. And, of course, the politician so rudely displaced was Dodd’s very good friend about whom Yeats had written, “Think where man’s glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends.”
