Political dynasties fade away

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.”

Whether a quirk or a trend, the dynastic dissing appears to have picked up momentum in recent months.

In Illinois, Mr. Jackson, son of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, not only did not get the Senate seat vacated by Mr. Obama, he was caught up in the embarrassing federal probe of Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s suspected efforts of trying to auction off the seat to the highest bidder. Former State Attorney General Roland Burris eventually took the seat.

Mrs. Clinton at times in her presidential campaign appeared to be handicapped by her married name, with voters and commentators turned off by the prospect of two families essentially taking turns running the country for more than two decades.

The satirical Web site bushclintonforever.googlepages.com calculated last year that no American under 45 had ever voted in a presidential election without a Bush or a Clinton.

The site spun out a scenario in which the two families could stay in power at least through 2041, assuming two terms for the administrations of Presidents Hillary Rodham Clinton; Jeb Bush, former Florida governor and son and brother to presidents; Chelsea Clinton, the former first daughter; and George P. Bush, Jeb Bush’s eldest son, who is a lawyer and real estate developer in Texas.

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