2 Kennedys Call on Party to Rekindle JFK’s Vision

The kin and kindred souls of President John F. Kennedy raised the torch of the New Frontier to summon Democrats on Tuesday night to extend the nation’s prosperity to those left behind.

In the city where Kennedy was nominated 40 years ago, his daughter, Caroline, brother Edward and others at the Democratic convention invoked the memory of the slain president--and the vision he called the New Frontier--to urge the election of Al Gore.

“As I look out across this hall and across this country, I know that my father’s spirit lives on,” said Caroline Kennedy in a rare political appearance that was an emotional high point of a sentimental evening.

“Now, we are the New Frontier. And now, when many of us are doing so well, it is time once again to ask more of ourselves,” she said, echoing her father’s inaugural address. “As much as we need a prosperous economy, we also need a prosperity of kindness and decency. We need a president who is not afraid of complexity, who believes in an open and tolerant society and who knows the world can be made new again.”

Kennedy arrived onstage at Staples Center to the orchestral music from Camelot, the Broadway musical her mother famously used to describe the 1,000 days of the Kennedy administration.

The last living member of the late president’s immediate family was greeted with adoring applause, as was her uncle when he followed her onstage. The moment recalled the introduction of Edward M. Kennedy by her late brother, John Jr., at the 1988 convention.

She did not refer directly to her brother’s death in an airplane crash 13 months ago, but she did thank Americans for “sustaining us through the good times, and the difficult ones.”

Turning Up the Heat On Bush

For all the poignancy, however, there was serious political business at hand Tuesday night, as Democrats sought to rally the party’s liberal base to more enthusiastically support Gore and his centrist “New Democrat” approach.

The tone was more overtly partisan than Monday’s opening night. The speeches were more peppery, the attacks on Republicans and their presidential nominee, George W. Bush, more biting.

“George W. is an affable man, a friendly man,” the Rev. Jesse Jackson said, but then he criticized the Texas governor on everything from his tax proposal to his failure to condemn the flying of the Confederate battle flag over the South Carolina capitol.

“He stood with Jefferson Davis and chose the Confederate flag over the American flag,” Jackson said. “He refused to offer leadership on hate crimes legislation and wants to give the surplus back to the richest 20% to buy more yachts.

“I say there is a lesson here: Stay out of the Bushes!” Jackson shouted, bringing more than 4,000 roaring delegates to their feet.

In a recurring refrain, one speaker after another mocked the Republican show of diversity on the stage at their Philadelphia convention two weeks ago.

“I am not from Central Casting. I am part of the real diversity and the real difference of the Democratic Party,” said Commerce Secretary Norman Y. Mineta, a former congressman from San Jose who recently became the first Asian American Cabinet secretary in U.S. history.

Far from the center of events, Gore continued his westward travels toward Los Angeles, meeting up with President Clinton at a campaign stop in Michigan. Their rendezvous in blue-collar Monroe, outside Detroit, was a bit of stagecraft meant to symbolize the passing of preeminence within the Democratic Party.

After brief remarks and a shower of confetti, the two men embraced. Clinton, his wife, Hillary, and their daughter, Chelsea, retreated from the stage. Then, after a pause and wave, Gore plunged into the crowd and the campaign ahead.

Set to Become the Nominee

The vice president is set to arrive today in Los Angeles; tonight he officially becomes the Democratic nominee.

Gore’s running mate, Joseph I. Lieberman, arrived in Los Angeles on Tuesday morning and, after a few hours’ sleep, set about some political fence-mending. He met with a group of black activists--winning the endorsement of Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles)--and later reached out to the entertainment industry by attending a reception at the home of David Salzman, a Hollywood producer and prominent Democrat.

The senator from Connecticut has alienated some of those core party loyalists with his conservative social positions. But a few hours later, making a brief stop on the convention floor, Lieberman was greeted with a thunderous ovation and chants of “Let’s go, Joe!” Tonight, he will address the convention after he is formally installed on the Democratic ticket.

In contrast to Monday’s session--a devotional look back at the last eight years, highlighted by Clinton’s valedictory address--the convention theme abruptly shifted overnight. On Tuesday, it was forward-looking and all Gore, all the time: Al Gore the fighter. Al Gore the father. Al Gore the champion of children. Al Gore the caretaker of the elderly.

“There have been only three times in my life that I have supported candidates for president as early and as enthusiastically as I have supported Al Gore; two of them were my brothers,” said Edward M. Kennedy, the senator from Massachusetts.

Citing his long-standing goal of a universal health care system, Kennedy said Gore “is the only candidate committed to moving this country, step by step,” toward that goal, “starting by covering every child by the year 2004. He believes in it with his heart and his soul.”

Kennedy recalled the night his brother accepted the party’s presidential nomination in a speech at Memorial Coliseum before a crowd of 75,000.

“Today, our generation faces its own new frontier,” he said. “. . . Will we dare to dream of a far horizon, or will we look inward, look backward, lower our sights and narrow our vision? That is the choice we face in the election of 2000.”

Nostalgic Overtones

Earlier in the day, two other Kennedys--the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy’s daughter, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, and son, Robert Jr.--spoke to delegates. The nostalgic overtones were not lost on the delegates.

“It was very moving, the idea that here were are, repeating history, but making history, the same way they did it 40 years ago,” said Steve Richman, an attorney from Brooklyn.

“My first memories are of [President Kennedy’s] funeral,” he said.

Referring to Caroline Kennedy, he added, “To . . . see the similar voice, the face, the tones and the content, it’s clear the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

Bill Bradley, who faced Gore in a bruising primary battle, joined the effort to rally liberals by citing a commonality of purpose with his erstwhile foe. “We fight for the same Democratic values, and we will fight for them together in the fall,” said the former New Jersey senator, who ran to Gore’s left in his unsuccessful bid for the party nomination.

Showing more verve than he had in his often moribund campaign, Bradley energetically took on Republicans and their portrait of inclusion in Philadelphia.

“We don’t window-dress diversity--we’re the party of diversity,” Bradley said, setting up a lengthy set of contrasts that played on Bush’s attempts to moderate the GOP’s image. “We don’t declare ourselves compassionate--we’ve been acting compassionately for decades. We don’t just talk about prosperity--we make it happen.”

Like many others, Bradley painted the election as a referendum on how best to extend and share the bounty of the nation’s record prosperity.

“This election is not merely a choice between two individuals,” Bradley declared. “. . . It’s a choice between a Republican Party that’s determined to give the fruits of our hard-won prosperity to those who don’t need the help, and a Democratic Party that promises to use this great opportunity to provide care for the ill, to lift up millions from poverty, to heal the racial divide and to ensure that every child has a decent public school.”

Bradley referred only wryly to the brawl with Gore that led to his withdrawal from the race. “It was a joyous journey,” he said, recapping an old line of his stump speech, “and I have the scars to prove it.”

A Lengthy Keynote Address

The evening keynote speaker was Rep. Harold E. Ford Jr., a 30-year-old congressman from Tennessee. He offered a lengthy narrative of Gore’s life and a further attack on the Republican ticket, as the crowd inside the Staples Center began thinning out.

“Some in the other party would have us go back,” Ford said. “Back to a past where prosperity touches only the well-off and well-connected. Back to a past where children learn from outdated textbooks and parents can’t scrape together the money to send them to college.

“Back to a past where polluters write our environmental laws. Back to a past where politicians run up enormous deficits, run factories out of business and run the economy into the ground.”

Aside from the Kennedy reunion and the flights of partisan rhetoric, there was one formal bit of business: Democrats formally adopted their platform. The credo hews to the more centrist stance Clinton has charted and Gore wants to follow, while also reiterating some of the party’s more traditional positions.

It supports abortion rights and opposing school vouchers and partial privatization of Social Security. But the document advocates tax cuts and a missile-defense system--albeit both more modest than Republicans prefer.

“This is a platform for all of America,” said Minneapolis Mayor Sharon Sayles Belton, who presided over the drafting of the document, which was adopted by a nearly unanimous voice vote shouted out in a half-empty convention hall.

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Times staff writers Edwin Chen, Richard T. Cooper, Faye Fiore, James Gerstenzang, Matea Gold, Janet Hook and Elizabeth Mehren contributed to this story.

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