What's in a name?

In part, this narrowing goes directly back to the Kennedy White House. Whoever occupied the presidency in 1961 would have had the same opportunity, but Jack Kennedy learned especially well the lessons of Hollywood, and understood in a profound way the radical new power that television would give incumbent office holders. He wrote the book by which media politics are still played. It was with the Kennedy White House -- and later, with Robert Kennedy's anti-war presidential primary -- that the terrain of American politics began its seismic shift from the smoke-filled room to the television screen. Today's dynasty members like Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush are incumbents in the only office that really counts: the media spotlight.

It was the Kennedys, too, who created the office-holding family as glamorous celebrities and established the country's long fascination with the Kennedy children, first seen playing under their father's desk and then standing mute at his graveside. It was the drive of Robert and Edward Kennedy, and later some of their children, to follow Jack into the electoral arena, that made the whole idea of a political dynasty safe for public consumption. In that sense, Hillary, George, Al and Liddy are all Jack Kennedy's children.

If there is one major generation gap between today's political sons and daughters and their parents, it is the shift in power from those old smoke-filled room to the corporate conference room. In 1960, Mayor Daley, the father, could deliver to JFK, the father, the presidential nomination and the White House through the power of his Chicago patronage machine. Patronage still matters, but the patronage that matters today is the campaign contribution. Mayor Daley, the son, spends the kind of time hobnobbing with Chicago bankers that Mayor Daley, the father, spent with neighborhood precinct captains.

If the Kennedy-inspired media spectacle is the engine of dynastic elections, its fuel line is the campaign-finance system established in the 1970s that turned the democratic vehicle of politics into a money-guzzling limo for the wealthiest political donors and interests. Large-scale campaign contributors are investors, and, like Goldman-Sachs, they prefer to risk their money on blue-chip stocks.

The campaign-finance system, in turn, only reflects an even deeper and more ominous development: a great concentration in power and wealth upward. It is this concentration that makes possible the huge, steaming heaps of campaign cash accumulated by the Bush campaign -- so much money that he is already rejecting federal campaign aid and the restrictions that come with it. JFK Jr's grandfather, Joseph Kennedy, was a bare-knuckle millionaire, but I doubt that in his wildest imaginings he could conceive of a country in which Bill Gates alone controls as much personal wealth as the bottom 40 percent of the population.

The great irony is that the dynastic politics of this summer turn upside-down what the Kennedy name once seemed to promise. The shift from candidates representing issues and constituencies to political brand names advertised like aspirin or automobiles narrows political engagement and puts power even more nakedly into the hands of wealthy donors and media brokers. Brand-name politics makes more distant the promise that many of those who mourn JFK Jr. this week once heard in his father's oratory on civil rights and economic justice, and later in the passion of Robert Kennedy's final crusades.

The debris washing up on the shores of Martha's Vineyard is no metaphor, for politics or anything else. Three people are dead. But it would be a mistake to write off the public response to JFK Jr.'s death as just another ghoulish dance around celebrity catastrophe. In that response, instead, lies both solace and warning: solace that the embers of Kennedy-era idealism still stir some loyalty and emotion; warning that the politics of dynasties and dollars, rooted in the Kennedy years, now are closing off like steel barriers the very avenues whose broadening the name "Kennedy" once seemed to represent.

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