(FORTUNE Magazine) – One is Ivy League, the other Big Ten. One is the son of an ambassador, the other the son of a milkman. One is mending his reputation as a rogue, the other fighting a reputation as a boy scout. Neither has ever won a Democratic presidential nomination, though both have tried mightily.

Ted Kennedy and Dick Gephardt are simultaneously liberalism's brightest lights and biggest lightning rods. The Missouri House member has become increasingly close in recent months to the Massachusetts Senator (and to the Senator's son Patrick, a House member himself). It's an alliance that has important implications for the Democratic Party, for the House leadership--and for the next presidential campaign. All three are intent on preserving Medicare and Social Security, extending subsidized health care to the poor, and battling wage stagnation among middle-class workers. They want to give new life to the New Deal. "The worrisome thing is that the promise we have made with Social Security and Medicare is passe," Gephardt told me. "If we walk away from a commitment to these programs--the best things the Democratic Party has ever done--we deserve to be criticized."

No one argues more passionately that government has a social contract with the people. That view once dominated the Democratic Party (and the nation), but the advent of New Democratic thought and a succession of Clinton budget proposals have eroded and endangered it. On the airwaves, on the floors of both chambers, even in a joint op-ed piece in the Washington Post, Ted Kennedy and Gephardt have battled back. They've already made a difference: Together they persuaded President Clinton to rethink how he viewed GOP budget proposals, and to outmaneuver the Republicans on Medicare. They also pushed through a minimum-wage increase.

Gephardt's relationship with Patrick Kennedy, the 30-year-old Congressman from Rhode Island, is one part mentorship and one part friendship. The two travel together and confer regularly. Their joint political-action committee splits the take on fundraisers, providing Kennedy with the kind of money that a second-term Congressman otherwise never would see. They formed their bond the year before Patrick won his House seat; Gephardt, in a departure from protocol, endorsed young Kennedy in a Democratic primary, and later Kennedy returned the favor by endorsing Gephardt "for anything he may do" in the future. The presence of one of the political Kennedys--not a tabloid Kennedy but, as Gephardt describes Patrick, "a real working member of Congress"--could pay dividends in New Hampshire 28 months from now.

Of course, Gephardt hasn't decided to run for President; he's watching to see how his rival, Vice President Al Gore, fares in this fall's feeding frenzy on campaign finance. And he's waiting to see whether the Democrats retake the House next year, which would catapult him into the Speaker's chair and make a presidential campaign more complicated. Either way, his alliance with Patrick may help shape the House in the future. The corridor talk is that Gephardt will move Kennedy to the powerful Ways and Means or Appropriations committee if the Democrats win the House in 1998. Although some say Kennedy will run for the Senate in 2000, those who know better think he has an eye on a leadership post in the House, which Gephardt could help him win at an astonishingly early age.

Ted is the man at the center of all these relationships, but Gephardt right now is the man on the make--trying to remake the House, to remake his party--maybe even to make a run for the White House. The real test of the Kennedy-Gephardt axis will come if Gephardt challenges Gore in 2000. He will want Ted's endorsement even more than Patrick's. But would the elder Kennedy spurn his fellow former Senator to support a man from the House? It's a stretch.

DAVID SHRIBMAN is Washington bureau chief of the Boston Globe and a Pulitzer Prize-winning political reporter.