Barack Obama’s choice to involve Caroline Kennedy, daughter of the late president, as part of a three-person team leading his search for a running mate is another not-so-subtle example of his very real desire to be seen as the present-day embodiment of Camelot. It may turn out to be a very effective strategy in a day and age when style and image trump just about everything else. His repeated vow to change this country, with its non-specific resemblance to JFK’s 1960 rhetorical promise to “get America moving again,” seems to resonate with crowds.

Change what? Move where? Such messages tend to resonate with people who are disaffected, and the hearer is free to insert his or her own hopes and fears into the narrative.

A closer look at Mr. Obama, however, will reveal that he actually seems to bear a closer resemblance to JFK’s younger brother Bobby, who was tragically murdered forty years ago this week in a moment of violent insanity.

Robert Kennedy’s late entry into the already rambunctious 1968 presidential campaign in mid-March that year sent shock waves through the political world. Richard Nixon was in Portland, Oregon on March 16th as he watched the New York Senator’s candidacy announcement. Already well on his way to the Republican nomination a few months later, he was facing the fact that he might indeed find himself running against the brother of the slain president who had beaten him eight years before. He told an aide as he watched, “very terrible forces have been unleashed. Something bad is going to come of this. God knows where this is going to lead.” Nixon understood something about politics, people, and the political milieu of the moment.

There arose a legend in the aftermath of Bobby’s death - one similar to what was conjured up following his brother’s assassination five years earlier. As the story goes, everything would have been different had he lived and been elected president. That’s certainly an understandable sentiment from those who loved and followed him – but as with most martyr-driven myths, it’s unrealistic. He probably wouldn’t even have won the nomination that August.

The fact, though, that so many hopes and dreams were projected onto a forty-two year old politician, who had little of the obvious charisma of his famous sibling, is a reminder that faith (as in believing in something or someone intensely) is a powerful dynamic when released politically.

Barack Obama, for what it’s worth and for whatever reason, seems to be tapping into that mysterious force. Many seem to be willing to ignore actual issues because they see in the young man from Illinois a non-specific inspirational quality. For example, many Catholics overlook his radical stand on abortion – as do many younger Evangelicals – in a way they never would with mere mortal candidates.

Georgetown University history professor Michael Kazin defines populism as: “a language whose speakers conceive of ordinary people as a noble assemblage not bounded narrowly by class, view their elite opponents as self-serving and undemocratic, and seek to mobilize the former against the latter.”

He also suggests in his book, The Populist Persuasion: An American History, that populism is “more an impulse than an ideology.”

This explains candidacies that seem to transcend the race for a particular office and become, in fact, movements. That’s what was happening in 1968 with Robert Kennedy and it’s happening these days, for better or for worse, with Barack Obama.

Those of us old enough to remember those days have vivid memories of Robert Kennedy’s funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, complete with an eloquent and moving eulogy by Ted Kennedy. And we remember that train traveling more than 200 miles from New York City to Washington, D.C. where Bobby would be buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

Evan Thomas, in his book: Robert Kennedy: His Life, wrote:

“As they had for Lincoln, many thousands – perhaps, for RFK, a million people – lined the tracks. The coffin, on a bier close to the floor of the observation car, could not be seen by bystanders. So Kennedy’s pallbearers lifted it up and placed it, a bit precariously, on chairs. Along the route of the train, Boy Scouts and firemen braced at attention; nuns, some wearing dark glasses, stood witness; housewives wept.”

The comparison is often made between RFK’s final trip and another one 103 years before involving slain president Abraham Lincoln. However, often overlooked is one other rail journey bearing the body of a fallen populist hero. That funeral train actually makes a better comparison to the Kennedy story.

The date is July 29, 1925 and a train leaves tiny Dayton, Tennessee. It bears the body of William Jennings Bryan – the populist and pacifist three-time Democratic presidential nominee. He died in his sleep on a Sunday afternoon a few days after the ending of his Scopes trial showdown with Clarence Darrow.

Though he had chronically fallen short of the presidency, he along the way earned the lasting loyalty and deep affection of a vast following of regular everyday people across the country. These common people felt that he was one of them and somehow, somewhere along the way, the unofficial title of “The Great Commoner” permanently attached itself to him. Continued...