repubgazette5-30-07juniorsenator70bobbylibromance

U.S. Senator Jay Rockefeller will be celebrating his 70th birthday in a couple of weeks, but after more than two decades in the Senate, he continues to take a back seat to his West Virginia counterpart, Robert C. Byrd, who is nearly 20 years older than Rockefeller and has served in the Senate since 1959.

Rockefeller will turn 70 on June 18. He and Byrd bring a combined age of about 160 to their jobs.

Rockefeller is the oldest and longest serving senior citizen junior Senator in the nation, having served as the state's lower ranking Senator since 1985.

Until last year, neighboring Ohio Sen. George Voinovich had Rockefeller beat age-wise as a junior Senator, but Sen. Mike DeWine's defeat last year now makes Voinovich the senior Senator in the Buckeye State.

While rumors circulated for a while that Rockefeller might not run for reelection in 2008, Democrat victories last year made him chairman of the Intelligence Committee and have given him incentive to hang in there, as well as chase his dream to serve as the state's senior Senator before he retires someday.

The West Virginia Republican Party has initiated a monthly automated recurring donation plan that provides supporters the opportunity to make regular smaller donations that add up big over the course of a year.

By printing and filling out the form at right, donors can give monthly amounts ranging from as little as $10 a month. Party officials are asking Republican supporters to consider the $25 a month option.

"For the cost of a couple of trips a month to a fast food restaurant, you can support the state GOP and help bring real change to West Virginia," said Chairman Doug McKinney.

I recently rented and watched the 2006 film "Bobby," the love letter to former Sen. Bobby Kennedy directed by Emilio Estevez, son of longtime leftwing actor Martin Sheen, who also appears in the film.

Why would a conservative Reagan-loving Republican like me rent what I know will be a misty-eyed liberal ode to one of the left's great icons? My wife wondered, too. Well, just because.

As I anticipated, "Bobby" was an enjoyable film. How could it miss with a cast including Anthony Hopkins, Laurence Fishburne, Helen Hunt, Demi Moore and William H. Macy, not to mention Hollywood activist Democrats like Sheen, Sharon Stone and Harry Belafonte, and young Tinseltown wannabes like Heather Graham, Ashton Kutcher and Lindsay Lohan? The film had to be interesting for its variety alone.

What the film propagated more than anything was the left's romantic view of what it wished politics to be. Kennedy himself was featured in archival footage traveling across the country (including one long stretch that could have been filmed in impoverished parts of West Virginia, but just as easily Kentucky or another Appalachian region) offering comfort to the poor.

But the film wasn't so much about Bobby Kennedy as about the hopes and dreams attached to him by many Americans disillusioned by events of the 1960s.

To its credit, "Bobby" is not as heavy handed in its preaching as I anticipated. The film focuses on the daily mundane lives of guests and employees of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 6th, 1968, the day of the California primary election, and the evening Kennedy was shot and killed just after his speech.

The movie's best moment is at the end, when Kennedy is addressing a ballroom full of supporters and the camera pans across the faces of the characters we have been following throughout their day as they watch and listen to their idol with rapt attention, then see their dreams shattered by his violent death.

What we have learned about each person throughout the course of the film lets us feel we can almost read each of their minds as they hear what they each want to hear from Kennedy, and we understand that Kennedy's words have a different impact on each character based on his or her own shortcomings, hopes or dreams.

Both Bobby Kennedy and his brother, former President John F. Kennedy, have naturally been lionized and romanticized far beyond what their actual lives or accomplishments deserve. In fact, I

have always felt that were he in politics today, President Kennedy would probably be a Republican, dedicated as he was to a strong national defense and cutting taxes. Bobby, though, was infinitely more liberal than his fallen brother. His mostly fuzzy campaign message in 1968 consisted mainly of a variation of the Rodney King theme, "Can't we all just get along?"

But with race riots, violent Vietnam war protests and assassinations dominating the decade, Kennedy's simple message was resonating with young Americans in particular. Whether Bobby could have gone on to win the Democrat nomination, or ultimately have defeated Richard Nixon in November of '68, will always be pure conjecture.

What many Americans found appealing in Kennedy in 1968 strikes me as what many Americans today like about Barack Obama -- a generally ill-defined candidate, but one who is attractive if for no other reason than he talks of hope, peace and love, and seems sincere when he talks about such things.

Those who are drawn to such politicians don't usually have a clue how those candidates might actually make that dream a reality. And in the end, they are left disappointed, because no such plan exists on the face of the earth.

In his eulogy of brother Bobby, Senator Ted Kennedy invoked some moving words. But unfortunately, it really is not enough to see wrong and try to right it, see suffering and try to heal it, or see war and try to stop it. The world is sadly more complicated than that. But dreamers really don't care about that. They prefer their dream to reality, and sometimes that's understandable.

Dreamers make our best poets and philosophers. But they make our most flawed politicians. Dreams always give way to real life, and we are served better by leaders who know as much, and voters who are more practical than to buy into the rhetoric that life is but a dream.