Americans who remember the 1960s and President John Kennedy have not forgotten the adoration with which many men and women viewed the charismatic Democrat, Congressman Jim Cooper said Monday night in Chattanooga.
In many homes, a photo of President Kennedy - who brought hope to the poor and disenfranchised as well as their more prosperous friends and neighbors - was a prominent fixture, he said.
This year, the congressmen told over 350 Democratic activists attending the annual Estes Kefauver Award Dinner, Americans have the chance to elect another Democrat who he said symbolizes hope: Barack Obama.
Rep. Cooper said even many lifelong Republicans - including former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who announced Sunday that he plans to vote Democratic this year - now believe that Obama is the man America needs in the White House.
But although polls currently indicate Obama is ahead, he noted, it would be a mistake to assume that the election is already won. Democrats still have lots of work ahead of them during the weeks before the Nov. 4 election, he emphasized.
The congressman’s upbeat, optimistic tone was echoed by other speakers at the dinner, who included Bob Tuke, a candidate for U.S. Senate, and State Sen. Andy Berke, and by the crowd at large.
For example, Brian McGhee, who moved here from Daphne, Ala., in 2006, said he found a concrete way to express his enthusiasm for the Obama-Biden ticket.
An artist, young McGhee designed a special “Ba-rock the vote – Chattanooga” T-shirt for this past weekend’s event by that name. Monday, he brought along some of the shirts to the Kefauver dinner and offered them for sale to the crowd. People who want to buy a T-shirt between now and the election can do so by calling him at 598-9377 or contacting local Democratic headquarters, he said.
During the evening, longtime local Democratic activist Annie Hall and Paul Smith were named recipients of the 2008 Estes Kefauver Award.
Since her marriage to Tennessean Jim Hall in 1973 and move to the Volunteer State two years later, Mrs. Hall has been prominent in local political circles. She was appointed an at-large delegate for Jimmy Carter in 1976, and has worked in every presidential election since.
Speakers said Judge Sam Payne and former Congresswoman Marilyn Lloyd were unable to attend the celebration. The judge and his wife were on their way to pick up their grandson who has been serving in Afghanistan, and Mrs. Lloyd is recovering from surgery.
The Kefauver Dinner is a local tradition.
Largely forgotten in the rest of the nation, Estes Kefauver is still remembered fondly in Chattanooga - the city he adopted after graduating from Yale Law School and called home for more than a decade.
Before he became a U.S. Congressman and then a senator - and, finally, the running mate for Gov. Adlai Stevenson in the 1956 presidential race - he was a Chattanooga attorney and political activist.
Born July 26, 1903, in Madisonville, the lifelong Democrat graduated from the University of Tennessee, where he played football and edited the student newspaper, and then went on to obtain his law degree from Yale University.
Young Kefauver then returned to eastern Tennessee and practiced law in Chattanooga from 1927 to 1939, when he was selected to serve as Tennessee 's Commissioner of Finance and Taxation
Later that year, he returned to Chattanooga and launched a successful campaign for the Third District congressional seat left vacant after the death of Rep. Sam D. McReynolds.
Once elected, the ardent supporter of the Tennessee Valley Authority and President Franklin Roosevelt served in the U.S. House of Representatives until 1949, and in the U.S. Senate from 1949 until his death in 1963.