Over at U.S. News & World Report, Dan Gilgoff (with a big nod to David Gibson) takes note of an interesting demographic point:

Ted Kennedy’s death is an end to several different eras, but Politics Daily’s David Gibson warns against seeing it as the end of an era for the socially minded ethnic Catholic tradition in Democratic politics:

It is tempting to view Ted Kennedy’s passing as the end of an era, both politically and culturally, but also religiously—the end of a reform-minded, socially oriented Catholicism that entered the mainstream in the 1960s and brought certain liberal values to the public square while remaining anchored, at times tenuously, to the religious (and ethnic) tradition that nurtured those values…

[But] surveys of young adult Catholics over recent years have shown that, in many respects, the younger generation resembles Kennedy’s approach to faith and politics, with social justice and equality for women and gays as public markers of their religion, and devotion to the sacraments the lodestar of their private devotion.

Indeed, Barack Obama appears bent on reviving the socially minded ethnic Catholic Democratic tradition embodied by the Kennedy family…

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