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NEWTON, Mass. — Rep. Joe Kennedy says he’s willing to consider running in 2020—if Oprah Winfrey asks him to be her running mate.


“That might do it. If I could sail in as Oprah’s VP. So, Oprah, if you’re listening, go for it,” the Massachusetts Democrat joked in an interview for POLITICO’s Off Message podcast. “Short of that, I’m not holding my breath.”

Kennedy knows his party has a problem, captured as much by the response to Winfrey’s Golden Globes speech as the response to his speech.

“Democrats are really good at finding some smart people that can run some regressions and say, ‘Here’s what the analysis is on X,’” Kennedy said. “What you need to do is to match that policy with a message that people can understand, and a messenger who has credibility with the people we seek to actually persuade to vote for us.”

For all the talk of how Democrats need a big message that’s not just anti-Donald Trump, they know that this president is so clarifying that merely opposing him puts them on board with a pretty specific set of issues—supporting Dreamers and gun control, opposing hate groups and taking a completely different approach to tax cuts.

But look ahead to November—and more importantly, to the great sifting soul search of the presidential race that will begin as soon as the midterm votes are counted—Kennedy said, and “this is as much about the credibility of the messenger as it is about the message, as it is about the policy—and that means that Democrats need to figure out who can do that.”

Trump, “to give him credit,” Kennedy said, “had his finger on the pulse of something that most people didn’t see or feel. Democrats need to do that, too.”

In other words, though he campaigned hard for Hillary Clinton, he thinks Joe Biden would have won.

So who is that candidate for 2020?

“I want everybody to run,” Kennedy said. “Jump on in.”

Almost any of the potential Democratic nominees would take the party in a different direction, but they’d all still be Democrats, Kennedy said. Whether they would be believable Democrats is a different question.

“I am not perturbed at all about the prospect of a big, messy primary for Democrats,” Kennedy said. That includes Biden, who would be 78 at the time of the next presidential inauguration—“I’m not going to vote for or against somebody because they’re old or young,” Kennedy said. And it includes Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator who taught Kennedy at Harvard Law: “I think she would be a great president.”

What about Kennedy himself? He’s a 37-year-old congressman at a time when the best-known figures in the party have wrinkles and gray hair; he’s started to make a name for himself as a leading liberal voice on health care and other issues; he chairs Congress’ Transgender Equality Task Force; he speaks fluent Spanish from his service with the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic; he met his wife in Warren’s class at Harvard Law. He has the most revered family name in Democratic politics.

But don’t look to him to be the messenger he says Democrats need.

“I don’t see that happening. I just don’t,” he said. “I realize that some folks might not believe me in this—I didn’t run for Congress on the hopes that one day you’re going to run for something else.”

Kennedy was sitting in his district office, on the third floor of a completely nondescript office building (all the furniture is left over from his predecessor Barney Frank, he noted), after a morning of cable news hits making the same ha-ha joke about using less ChapStick next time. The night before, he delivered the Democratic response to the State of the Union—not bad for a third-term congressman—and received a generally enthusiastic response—not bad for a party that was so scrambled by Trump’s win that its big idea for a response last year was to have a bland former governor of Kentucky speak from a diner in Lexington, all but holding up a big sign pleading with white working-class people to come back.

Click here to subscribe to the full podcast and hear Kennedy recount the day Nancy Pelosi scared him ahead of asking him to do the State of the Union response, and what he says people don’t see about the Kennedy family the way he learned about them in history class.

Kennedy’s speech, meanwhile, was an earnest reading of Obama-esque themes, full of appeals to unity, dignity, higher ideals—and that there’s something deeper going wrong with the country, something more fundamental than political fights over Trump. It’s a fight over e pluribus unum: For Trump, “America First!” to a standing ovation from the Republican majority in Congress; for Kennedy “Out of many, one,” to a small crowd of supporters in a technical school in Massachusetts.

Kennedy’s big divergence from his prepared remarks was an ad-lib repeating the words “have faith,” as he rapped his knuckles against the lectern: “The state of our union is hopeful, resilient, enduring.”

The reaction to the selection of Kennedy, and his speech, was like a stir-fry of Democratic angst—do they have a message or do they have too many messages? Do they have so many future leaders that it made sense to give the official job to the rare prominent Democrat who isn’t running for president, or is their bench so thin that they had to turn to a congressman who just happens to have the most famous name in Democratic politics? Griping progressives wondered why the party couldn’t have picked a woman, or at least a nonwhite man. Some went full purity test, demanding to know how someone who doesn’t support legalizing pot could possibly be picked as the party’s official voice. Late-night comics mocked him both for being the retreadiest retread imaginable and for being so young—the “love child of Superman and Conan O’Brien,” was Stephen Colbert’s take on his headshot.

Really, it all boils down to a simpler worry among Democrats: If they can’t win now, in this environment, with this much energy in the streets, against a president this unpopular, the question is less, “Can they ever win?” than “Should they even exist?”

It bobs beneath the surface of every political conversation—from the discussion of Doug Jones’ victory in Alabama to hand-wringing about the Democratic National Committee having only slightly more cash on hand than debt as it opened this election year.

You get to the Diman Regional Vocational Technical School in Fall River, Massachusetts, by driving south out of Boston, past the JFK Presidential Library, and—on that night, at least—a digital billboard advertising an upcoming book-tour stop by Joe Biden in Medford. At the school, amid the scrum of local reporters, a Japanese TV crew sprung into action for a piece on the young congressman called, according to the on-air reporter, “The Hope of Democrats.” The man of the hour’s father, former Rep. Joe Kennedy II, entered the room to cheers of his own 10 minutes before the broadcast went live, joking, “You guys all wanted to hear from a Congressman Joe Kennedy?” and then later, “Is Trump still on?” A woman in the assembled crowd called at the screen in the back and said, “can’t hear him!” The older Kennedy shot back, “we don’t want to hear him!”

And then Congressman Joe Kennedy III appeared, sans sport coat, and the room erupted.

The ridiculous strength of the Kennedy genes means he has bright red hair on top of his grandfather RFK’s face. In a political atmosphere wrapped up in celebrity and in a party up against the greatest branding achievement in American history, he has the highest-caliber name in politics—though he knows that the window for the political appeal of the Kennedy name is narrowing as the children of the '60s get older, and that the part of his own appeal that’s rooted in his youth ticks by with each day.

“Nothing says the future like a Kennedy,” grumbled one Democratic operative the next day.

Kennedy knows what he’s up against.

“There are going to be some people that are inspired by the contributions that my family members have made, and, to an extent, apply that lens to me, which on the one hand is a blessing,” Kennedy told me. “On the other hand, when you’re going to give a speech and you’re getting compared to President Kennedy or Sen. Edward Kennedy or my grandfather, Robert Kennedy—they set the bar pretty high on how to deliver a speech, so, yikes.”

Only one was president, but each of those Kennedys broke through politics as a symbol: One was the voice of a new generation, one was the voice of that generation coming to be, the third almost unseated an incumbent president in a primary and went on to become the voice of a whole brand of politics and of the Senate itself.

So this Kennedy knows a little about symbolism, and what his party needs going into the years ahead.

“I believe folks are asking of the president, of their candidate—'When you’re in that position, will you remember people like me? Will you remember people that have the values and the concerns that I do? Or am I going to be the one that gets bargained away?'” Kennedy said. “And I think that comes down to a lot of that persona piece.”

