Barack Obama with the Kennedys in Washington, January 2008

An era is ending in American politics. For longer than India has been free, there has been a Kennedy in elected office in the United States of America. In the first week of January next year, the last of the Kennedy clan in politics, Congressman Patrick Kennedy, will bid farewell to public life. It is a testament to the mesmerizing hold of the Kennedy legend on the American people that the third son of the late senator, Edward Kennedy, will be only 42 when he retires from politics: however, by then, he would have completed eight terms in the US Congress.

But for contemporary America, the sunset of the Kennedy reign means much more than a swansong of a six decades-plus saga of the most influential political family in America. It signals the demise of the hopes that rose in the hearts of millions of Americans when Barack Obama was elected in 2008 to lead them out of the eight-year darkness of the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney era.

It was on January 28, 2008 that Patrick Kennedy, Edward Kennedy and Caroline Kennedy — JFK’s daughter who inspired the Neil Diamond single, Sweet Caroline — together endorsed Obama for president at a rally on the campus of the American University in Washington. Till then, no one had taken Obama’s candidacy seriously, and pundits had dismissed the freshman senator’s bid as an upstart political effort aiming for the moon. But the endorsement by the Kennedys, especially by Caroline, who had agreed to be under the spotlight for the first time in her life, changed the course of Obama’s quest for the White House.

Two years after that politically significant event, Obama became a lame duck in terms of his ambitious presidential agenda. The irony is that like his meteoric rise in politics, Obama’s decline too has a Kennedy connection. On January 19 this year, Democrats lost the Senate seat which Edward Kennedy had held for 47 years, a seat he inherited from his brother, President John F. Kennedy. And with that, they lost the 60th seat in the Senate, a pre-requisite to push through any legislation without fear of it being held up by the Opposition under the chamber’s arcane rules. Until the loss of Massachusetts, despite the drift in Obama’s presidency, no one risked talking about the possibility that Obama may end up as a one-term occupant of the White House. The loss of Kennedy’s home turf, which was unthinkable even for Republicans until the other day, has emboldened Americans to say out loud that like Jimmy Carter who could not win a second term in 1980,Obama’s future in 2012 is now uncertain.

This week, Patrick Kennedy’s announcement that he will not seek re-election in November has reinforced the notion that Obama’s well-meaning agenda is in tatters, and that the next US Congress, which will come into existence in January 2011, may well be Republican. The Rhode Island Congressman is not the only one who will bow out of the coming mid-term election.

Chris Dodd, the co-chair of the US Senate’s India Caucus, a Democratic member of the US House of Representatives since 1975 and Senator from Connecticut since 1981, is calling it quits. So is Byron Dorgan, who was elected to the House of Representatives in 1980, graduating to the Senate in 1992 after serving six terms. For Obama and his team, more worrying than the decision by veterans like Dodd and Dorgan not to seek re-election was an announcement by Ted Kaufman, the junior Senator from Delaware, that he will not be in the fray in November. Kaufman stepped into Joe Biden’s shoes a year ago and filled the seat vacated by Biden when he became vice-president. It was assumed at that time that Kaufman was merely keeping the seat warm for Biden’s son, Beau, now Delaware’s attorney-general, to take the plunge and contest for a full six-year term in the Senate, inheriting the seat which his father held since 1974. But in yet another of a string of surprises in the Democratic Party, Beau Biden, too, announced last month that he will not run for that Senate seat in November.

There is now a possibility that the Senate seat from Illinois, once held by Obama, may go to the Republicans in November. That seat was filled by Roland Burris, whose appointment became controversial after the then Illinois governor, Rod Blagojevich, was arrested on charges of corruption. It was alleged that Blagojevich, among other charges, tried to sell Obama’s seat to the highest bidder. Burris has decided not to run for the seat in view of a backlash over those charges.

On Monday, there were new problems for Obama and the Senate’s Democratic leadership when the two-term Senator from Indiana, Evan Bayh, joined this growing list of Democrats who have decided to opt out of re-election bids. Bayh has never lost an election in Indiana. He inherited the seat from his father, Birch Bayh, and has often been looked at as a potential Democratic presidential nominee for the future. India hired a lobbying firm in which father Bayh is a partner in view of the dividends that could come from such an association with the father-son political duo with a promising future as well as a past.

Last year, New York’s Democratic governor, David Paterson, messed up the appointment of a successor to the Senate seat from that state, which was vacated by Hillary Clinton after she was appointed secretary of state in the Obama administration. A front-runner for that vacancy was Caroline Kennedy, who eventually chickened out of that bid.

It was a reminder of the continuing strength of the Kennedy DNA in American politics that when Caroline showed a readiness to take up the Senate seat once held by her uncle, Robert Kennedy, there was an immediate sense of inevitability about her candidacy. If Caroline had, indeed, stepped into the breach created by Hillary Clinton, she may well have inherited the political legacy of her famous family after Edward Kennedy’s death.

But now, with the exit of cousin Patrick from the Congress, that legacy lies without an heir apparent in clear sight. Should Obama’s political star continue to wane, the absence of a Kennedy will also leave the Democrats with a vacuum, which could arguably have been filled at some point by someone with the Kennedy magic and charisma.

Not long ago, however, several of the 29 grandchildren of Joseph and Rose Kennedy, who founded the dynasty, seemed destined for high office. Mark Shriver, son of JFK’s sister Eunice Kennedy and Sargent Shriver, won two elections to the Maryland House of Delegates, the lower chamber of the state legislature, but his political hopes were dashed in 2002 when he narrowly lost a bid in the Democratic Party primary for a seat in the US Congress to Chris Van Hollen, who went to school in India as the son of a US diplomat posted in the country.

Robert Kennedy’s daughter, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, too, showed promise at one time when she was elected twice as lieutenant governor of Maryland, but because of a series of ill-judged political decisions, she was decisively defeated in her bid to be governor of this overwhelmingly Democratic state in 2002. Another of RFK’s children, Joseph Kennedy II, served six terms in the US House of Representatives, but quit politics to head a non-profit energy company he founded. Admirers of the Kennedys believe that he may yet emerge as the heir to the legacy because not long ago, he considered a shot at governorship of Massachusetts, and was mentioned as a possible candidate to succeed Edward Kennedy. Then there is Robert Kennedy Jr, the third of RKF’s 11 children, who has done remarkable work as an environmental attorney, who endorsed Hillary Clinton during the 2008 presidential primaries. He showed a short-lived interest in Clinton’s Senate seat from New York.

Although there may be no Kennedys in elected office next year, the family is still in the public glare in another role — as spouses of elected public servants. Maria Shriver, Mark’s sister, is the first lady of California, married to the governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. America waits, meanwhile, to see what course the next generation of Kennedys will choose for itself.