American Democratic Party
Black Water (Joyce Carol Oates Edition)The Democratic Party is the political setting through which the novel links Kelly Kelleher’s idealism to The Senator’s public career and presidential ambitions. Its 1988 defeat is not merely an electoral outcome: it devastates Kelly, while The Senator’s earlier withdrawal from the nomination contest leaves him calculating the possibility of another chance. Around them, party loyalty, national ritual, and political survival are shown in tension with the consequences of private actions.
Political setting and history
Kelly’s connection to the party is both intellectual and personal. At Brown University, she wrote a ninety-page senior honors thesis on The Senator, examining his three Senate campaigns, his career in the Senate, his influence within the Democratic Party, and the likelihood of his nomination for president. Her work earned an A and extensive praise from her adviser. The thesis joined her academic interest in liberal politics to an established political figure whose career she had studied closely.
Kelly’s political world also carries memories of the 1960s. After college she worked for a former political associate of The Senator from Bobby Kennedy’s campaign, a period remembered as one of youthful purpose and hope in the Democratic Party. Kelly herself was not yet four when Kennedy was assassinated and remembered nothing of the tragedy. Her employer, Carl Spader, distilled the occupation’s sustaining creed into the maxim that those in politics are optimists, a formulation that makes optimism both a personal disposition and a condition of political participation.
The 1988 contest and its aftermath
In the most recent presidential election, Kelly volunteered for Governor Dukakis’s campaign. She believed that George Bush’s hypocrisy, exploitation of racial fears, CIA affiliation, and shallow piety made his rejection self-evident. Even as national polls indicated that the Democratic campaign was in trouble, Kelly and her coworkers at campaign headquarters in Cambridge did not seem to grasp that defeat was approaching. The eventual landslide overturned her confidence in what she thought voters must see.
The result struck Kelly as a profound personal and political collapse. She stopped eating, went several nights without sleep, and wandered through Boston in a dazed, disheveled state. In Boston Common, she looked at human figures as misshapen, animal-like forms before breaking down and calling her mother to come get her because she did not know where she was. Her father had already condemned her work for Dukakis as a waste of time and energy; her mother’s earlier response to Kelly’s anger over her parents’ voting choices had challenged Kelly’s assumption that she knew how they voted. The party’s defeat therefore lands amid family disagreement as well as public disappointment.
The Senator and party ambition
The Senator had been one of the three leading contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988. For political prudence, he withdrew his name and released his delegates in favor of his old friend, the Massachusetts governor. Dukakis in turn asked him to join the ticket as running mate; The Senator politely declined. His decisions show influence within the party, but also a willingness to step aside when he judged that course prudent.
Withdrawal does not end his presidential hopes. He considers the next election, and even the one after that, still possible; at the time, he is eleven years younger than George Bush. That forward-looking calculation stands in sharp contrast to Kelly’s sense that the 1988 result has made the unthinkable ordinary history. The party provides both a route to national power and a structure in which defeat can suddenly rearrange private expectations.
National symbols and political exposure
The party’s electoral fortunes unfold beside the Fourth of July’s public display of national belonging. On Grayling Island, parties, parked cars, and anticipated fireworks fill the northern shore, while the St. John family’s American flag flies above the gathering. The flag is described as evidence that the nation remains present in the holiday spectacle; later, its colors and the fireworks accompany The Senator’s flight from the wreck. The pageant of patriotic celebration thus becomes an unsettling counterpoint to the political and bodily danger unfolding nearby.
The Senator’s fear after the crash is shaped by political exposure as much as by physical panic. As he limps toward the highway and a telephone, he imagines being seen, recognized, or photographed, and fears that the accident could end his prospects of nomination and election. When he reaches Ray Annick, he first identifies himself under another name, then admits who he is and says that the girl is dead. He immediately frames the accident as a possible manslaughter case and claims that Kelly was drunk and grabbed the wheel; Ray stops him from continuing over the phone and offers to come get him. The scene makes the party’s language of public responsibility inseparable from the private effort to control how responsibility will be understood.
Political meaning
The novel presents the Democratic Party through contrasting forms of attachment: Kelly’s conviction that political choice carries moral urgency, and The Senator’s practiced calculation of delegates, timing, and future opportunity. For Kelly, the 1988 loss shatters confidence and leaves her physically and emotionally disoriented. For The Senator, political survival remains imaginable even after defeat, but the crash threatens to turn a private act into a public scandal. The party’s promise of collective purpose therefore coexists with the vulnerability of individuals to electoral reversals and with the powerful temptation to recast events in the interests of reputation.
