“With all due respect, it’s not the Kennedy’s seat, it’s not the Democrats’ seat, it’s the people’s seat.”
Two months short of my third birthday, John F. Kennedy was sworn in as a freshman Senator from the State of Massachusetts. After serving for nearly eight years, he vacated the seat to serve as President. A caretaker by the name of Benjamin A. Smith kept the seat warm for a couple of years until Kennedy’s youngest brother was old enough to inherit the seat. Edward M. Kennedy then proceeded to fill the “Kennedy seat” for another 47 years.
When our Founding Fathers declared their independence from England, they held to be self-evident the truth that “all men are created equal.” In England, there were (and still are) commoners, noblemen, and royalty. Commoners were not equal to the nobility, and no one was equal to the royalty.
To this day, the United Kingdom recognizes so-called “hereditary peers” – people who have inherited their title as a birthright. Until 1999, these privileged individuals were entitled to a seat in the House of Lords based not for what they themselves had done but on the family they were born into.
Our country was founded on the principle that no one is “more equal” than anyone else in the eyes of the law. In theory at least, there are not separate sets of rules for different classes of people. This is why slavery and segregation were ultimately doomed – because both systems were diametrically opposed to the the principle that all men are created equal.
Yet despite this, a political class developed in this country. Starting with the Adams family (John and John Quincy, not Gomez and Morticia! ), there have been clans that seemed to have special rights when it came to elected office. If your name was Roosevelt, Gore, Bush, Dodd or Kennedy, you were a member of the ruling aristocracy in this country regardless of your intelligence or moral character. But as Scott Brown so eloquently stated, elected offices don’t belong to any family, or even any political party, but to the people. Tonight, the people have spoken.
I find it fitting that this break in the American aristocracy took place in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, where the first shots of the American Revolution were fired.
When I was 10 years old, I visited the Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts and read the famous verse by Ralph Waldo Emerson that memorialized the first battle of the revolution:
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flags to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.
Tonight, those who oppose the tyranny of a ruling class and one-party rule elected the “Scott” heard round the world.