Hidden among the many messages delivered last Tuesday was this one: The Kennedy captivity of the Democratic Party appears to be over.

The evidence in this past election season has been unmistakable. First, there was Max Kennedy (son of Robert), who had planned to run for Congress in suburban Boston but, after one calamitous news conference, was encouraged to fulfill his destiny elsewhere.

Then there was Andrew Cuomo (husband of Kerry, daughter of Robert), who is Mario Cuomo’s son and had served in the Clinton Cabinet. Largely on the basis of name recognition and celebrity marriage, he had expected to cruise to the Democratic nomination for governor of New York. But two obstacles intervened: The state comptroller, H. Carl McCall, who led Cuomo decisively in polls; and the incumbent governor, George Pataki, who ultimately clobbered McCall. With his patron Bill Clinton standing by his side, Cuomo withdrew from the Democratic primary and into oblivion.

In Maryland, where Democrats outnumber Republicans by 2 to 1, the story is sadder still. A gerrymandered district had been carved last year for the purpose of allowing state Del. Mark Shriver (son of Eunice) to challenge the incumbent Republican congresswoman, Connie Morella. But a funny thing happened on the way from Annapolis to Washington: Shriver was himself badly beaten in the Democratic primary by a state senator named Christopher Van Hollen, who then defeated Morella.

Which leaves us with the story of Kathleen Kennedy Townsend (daughter of Robert). Mrs. Townsend, a Radcliffe graduate and occasional essayist in The Washington Monthly, moved to the Baltimore suburbs with her family in 1986 and, with that sense of entitlement peculiar to her clan, promptly ran for Congress. Local Democratic chieftains, visions of Camelot dancing in their heads, rearranged matters to grant Mrs. Townsend nomination by default. And all went well ” until Election Day, when the incumbent, Republican Rep. Helen Delich Bentley, sent Mrs. Townsend back to her typewriter.

From which she was rescued eight years later. Parris Glendenning, the 1994 Democratic candidate for governor, and consummate Maryland hack, revived Mrs. Townsend’s blighted career by recruiting the closest available Kennedy to join him on the ticket, enlivening an otherwise sodden campaign. No one is entirely certain about the Townsend effect on that year’s election, but Glendenning narrowly won, and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend served eight years as lieutenant governor in the least popular regime in recent Maryland history.

When she undertook to succeed Glendenning this year, her maiden name and skill at raising cash in California scared off a series of potential challengers. All, that is, except one: a retired grocery clerk from Rockville, whose running mate was a homeless woman. Up against Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, he won 20 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary. After that, it was all downhill: Her double-digit lead in the polls swiftly evaporated, and she hired the Democrats’ favorite character assassin, consultant Robert Shrum, to produce TV spots accusing her GOP foe of racism. It didn’t work, and Rep. Robert Ehrlich (R-Md.), will now be Maryland’s first Republican governor since Spiro Agnew, elected in 1966.

Of course, the evident failure of one generation to duplicate history is not unusual: None of the Roosevelt boys ever amounted to much in politics, and not every Kennedy runs for public office. But given the reverence for this monied tribe from Boston, present circumstances are not encouraging. The personal problems of two siblings, ex-Congressman Joseph II (son of Robert) and Robert Jr., have already disqualified them from further promotion. And there are only two Kennedys left on the public payroll. There is 70-year-old Edward M., senior senator from Massachusetts, whose girth and ideology accord him the status of extinct volcano; and his 35-year-old son Patrick, newly re-elected congressman from Rhode Island, whose apparent instability and low-wattage brain have made him the laughingstock of Capitol Hill.

The torch, as it were, is passing into the shadows.

Is nothing sacred? In his recent study of “Snobbery: The American Version” (Houghton Mifflin), Joseph Epstein describes Jackie O as “a woman of modest attainments, who put up with a frightful amount from her philandering husband, supplied a veneer of culture over his presidency, but whose personal motto, finally, might have been … Montrez-moi l’argent: Show me the money.”

Indeed, the only Kennedy with any future in politics seems to be the movie muscleman Arnold Schwarzenegger, married to Maria Shriver (daughter of Eunice). And he’s a Republican.

– Philip Terzian is a columnist at the Providence Journal.