Politics & Power Quote by Michael Kinsley

Kinsley’s line is a neat little scalpel: it pretends to situate you historically, then quietly reveals how American politics gets narrated through celebrity gravity. The ostensible point is temporal - “the late 1970s” - but the sentence swerves into a relational identifier so absurdly indirect (“soon-to-be uncle by marriage”) that it exposes the author’s real target: the way status in public life can be smuggled in through fame-adjacent trivia rather than governing substance.

Ted Kennedy was, in that era, a gravitational force in Democratic politics - a liberal lion, a would-be standard-bearer, and also a man already shadowed by Chappaquiddick. Kinsley doesn’t mention any of that. He tags Kennedy to Schwarzenegger, who in the late ’70s was bodybuilding royalty and an emerging pop-cultural figure, not yet the Republican governor-to-be. That mismatch is the joke: we’re asked to recognize a major senator through a future Hollywood-family connection, as if political significance is best understood via the entertainment-industrial family tree.

The intent is less to belittle Kennedy than to parody the modern reader’s mental filing system. It flatters and indicts at once: you’re “in” on the reference, but the reference itself is a symptom of a culture where politics competes with celebrity for attention, and often borrows celebrity’s shortcuts to feel legible. The throwaway specificity is the punchline and the critique: history repackaged as gossip, governance rendered as IMDb trivia.