Bushes build a surprising dynasty

WASHINGTON — Until last week, American history had not been very kind to the idea of political dynasty at the national level.

After John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams, whose presidencies were failures but whose other services to the nation honor them, there were the undistinguished terms of Benjamin Harrison and his grandson William Henry Harrison, as well as the failures to win even state office by the sons of Franklin D. Roosevelt, himself only a fifth cousin to Theodore.

The Kennedys produced one martyred president and two brothers whose presidential hopes ended in a hotel kitchen in Los Angeles and on a bridge at Chappaquiddick, though Edward M. Kennedy's durable liberalism has changed the nation more than his brothers did. But the next generation of Kennedys produced two minor congressmen and a lieutenant governor, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, whose loss in the race for governor of Maryland on Tuesday was the family's first general election defeat since John F. (Honey Fitz) Fitzgerald, her great-grandfather, was beaten in a race for governor of Massachusetts in 1922.

But it is hard to imagine a better week for one family's dynastic prospects than the one that began with President Bush, after taking the risk of relentless campaigning, regaining a Senate majority for his party and becoming the first Republican president to gain House seats in an off-year election.

There was more. Those victories would have seemed hollow if Bush's brother Jeb had not been re-elected governor of Florida, withstanding a Democratic challenge that labeled him the party's No. 1 target. Not only that, Jeb Bush's easy victory made him an obvious presidential candidate for 2008, and President Bush's announcement that he would keep on Dick Cheney as vice president avoided anointing a rival to his brother.

Bush's domestic political success was crowned Friday at the United Nations, when the administration, after a patience that many critics and some supporters doubted, won a Security Council resolution demanding renewed weapons inspections in Iraq and warning of "serious consequences" if Baghdad resists. That vote, unlike the results on Election Day, was unanimous.