In the blue corner, the Clintons. In the red corner, the Kennedys.

Let’s face it, if Bill Clinton had been run over by a bus a year ago, Hillary Clinton would not be where she is today in the Democratic Party’s presidential race. She’s always had a powerhouse in her corner, the Big Draw, Bill. Oh sure, sometimes he’s put his foot in his mouth but that’s not always been accidental. Backfires happen, even when they’re scripted. Nonetheless it’s been a campaign waged by the Two-headed Clinton.

That makes it even more surprising that the challenger, underdog Barack Obama, has done as well as he has so far with his win in Iowa and his conquest of South Carolina. He’s had to run uphill while his opponent, the heir presumptive, has enjoyed the high ground advantage.

That playing field is going to be a little more even today thanks to the levelling effect of America’s greatest Democratic family, the Kennedys. Caroline Kennedy, daughter of the late JFK, wrote an astonishingly emotive endorsement of Obama in the New York Times on the weekend in which she described the man as cut from the same cloth as her father. Today, the brother of that same president, Senator Ted Kennedy, will also lend his name to the Obama campaign.

I’ve always felt it was somewhat unseemly that the Democratic field should have to run against the Billary tag team. Maybe, just maybe, Caroline and Ted, the Kennedys, can unhorse part of the Clinton behemoth.

Without the intervention of the old man, GHWBush, and the Lee Atwater dirty tricks played by Shrub’s Quasimodo, Rove, America might well have wound up in 2000 with Al Gore or John McCain as chief executive instead of having to splash around in the shallow end of the Bush gene pool for eight years. Imagine.