Political dynasties fade away

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By David R. Sands

Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. didn't get the vacant Illinois Senate seat.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton didn't get the Democratic presidential nomination, taking the job of secretary of state as a consolation prize.

And Caroline Kennedy and Andrew Cuomo lost out to an obscure two-term upstate congresswoman for the New York Senate seat once held by Mrs. Clinton.

Whatever happened to American democracy's traditional deference to political dynasties?

Call it Bush/Clinton/Bush/Clinton fatigue syndrome, or perhaps the new Obama meritocracy, but some of the most famous names in U.S. politics have come up empty-handed in recent days.

"I don't know how much of this you can tie to Obama, but it is a striking pattern," said Brian Flanagan, who has studied U.S. political dynasties as associate director of the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Mich.

"It's even more striking when you consider we've just completed the first presidential election since 1976 where there wasn't a Bush or a Clinton on the ticket and where the winner this time had no political pedigree whatsoever," he said.

Mr. Flanagan noted that it was not just Democrats who have failed to honor their elders. In the 2008 Republican presidential primary, Sen. John McCain of Arizona won the prize over former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, whose father, George W. Romney, was governor of Michigan and briefly a front-runner for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination.

J. David Hoppe, chief of staff for former Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi and now president of the Washington lobbying firm Quinn Gillespie and Associates, said Republicans are "monarchists" rather than supporters of dynasties, typically the candidate considered next in line.

In 1988, he noted, George H.W. Bush won the nomination not because he was the most dynamic candidate or the favorite of the party base but because he had been a "loyal, faithful vice president for eight years to Ronald Reagan."