All of this is to explain why you don't have to be young to respond to Barack Obama. In fact, the Kennedys showed you exactly why some of us are so enthusiastic. It's partly about what we once had--what we are so happy you can now have: a real leader you can admire, who can create opportunities for you to participate. A leader who can inspire you, not to be a mindless follower, but to think and feel anew, and to grow and learn in positive ways for your lives and your time, and for the future.

It's partly about what we lost, about what JFK used to call "the unfinished business of this country" that has remained unfinished all our lives. We know what our best leaders had, and we see what's needed now.

That's what the Kennedys saw. Ethel Kennedy formally endorsed Obama after Caroline, Ted and his son (Rep.) Patrick, but she may well have been the first of them to see what they came to see in Barack Obama:

It was on a November day in 2005, near the end of Mr. Obama’s first year in the Senate, when he was asked to deliver a keynote address at a ceremony commemorating the 80th birthday of Robert F. Kennedy. The invitation was extended by Ethel Kennedy, who at the time referred to Mr. Obama as “our next president.”

“I think he feels it. He feels it just like Bobby did,” Mrs. Kennedy told me that day, comparing her late husband’s quest for social justice to Mr. Obama’s. “He has the passion in his heart. He’s not selling you. It’s just him.”

But maybe it was best expressed by Harris Wofford, former U.S. Senator from PA who was with JFK from that 1960 campaign on. A Politico piece said:

One of the former advisers, Harris Wofford, said Obama “touches my soul.” "For me, no one has done that since John, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King,” Wofford said in December. “I waited a long time to have that feeling.”

But the connection is not just from the Kennedy legacy to Obama, or from that past to the present. It is about what the past tells us is necessary to meet the particular challenges of the present to create a better future.

I think about the future a lot. If I didn't, I'd have a different screen name. I see the challenges of the Climate Crisis and what meeting those challenges will require. And I see in Barack Obama's approach the hope that those challenges can be met. Because he talks about empathy, cooperation, the common good, and that we're all in this together, as well as because he talks about clean energy, environmental and social justice, government responsive to common needs as well as being responsible to those who need help the most.

Now those of us who lived through the Kennedy years are also going to advise caution and care. We've seen where high emotion can lead, and those ecstatic crowds do give us pause. Without dampening enthusiasm, we want to keep things in perspective and with a center of quiet and consciousness. But I sense that Obama knows this, and he is watchful and careful. Meanwhile, you won't mind if we share in all the youthful exuberance.

I worked(in a small way) for the election of our first Baby Boomer President, Bill Clinton. Election day in 1992 is one of my happier memories of the past several decades. I supported him when he was most beleaguered, and I admire the work he's done in the world since he left office. In a different time, I would happily support Hillary Clinton. But the politics that the Clintons practice, particularly in this campaign, are not going to get it done--not now. I see the future in Barack Obama, and I hope in the people he will attract and energize and lead. I'll be here to have my say. But I'll feel better that the future is in good hands.