Kennedy's Alleged Influence and Legislative Effectiveness
In fact, Ted Kennedy never even came close to (say) LBJ's ability to wheel and deal his way to pushing legislation through Congress, including the Great Society programs. Ted Kennedy opposed the liberation of Iraq from the get-go, failing at the time to convince any of Barack Obama's Senate rivals for last year's Presidential nomination. Ted Kennedy even voted against the first major expansion in Medicare (which he favored in principle) to provide a prescription drug benefit because he didn't favor Republican modifications to the concept. During the Nixon Administration, Kennedy went for broke in pushing single-payer national health care, spurning the administration's offer to expand business-sponsored health care, including needs-based subsidies; during the Clinton Administration, Kennedy was among those whom rejected Dole's compromise of catastrophic health care reform in yet another attempt to push for nationalization. More recent failed initiatives include his efforts with McCain to push a Patient's Bill of Rights and 2007 immigration reform.
Kennedy's Purported Bipartisanship
I recently wrote a post criticizing Kennedy's partisan push to reinstate the (currently Democratic) Massachusetts Governor's ability to appoint his own replacement (it was stripped because the Democrats were worried about Republican Governor Mitt Romney's potential appointment to fill John Kerry's seat after the 2004 election). Whereas much has been made of some of Kennedy's bipartisan dealings, e.g., with Senators Hatch and McCain and former President George W. Bush, I know that Ted Kennedy was a strident partisan, one of those responsible for the gridlock Obama disingenuously ran against last fall. Ted Kennedy's bipartisan efforts were politically expedient, and he never was a party to genuine bridging of differences, e.g., McCain's Gang of 14, which defused a crisis over the unconscionable use of the filibuster to prevent floor votes on judicial nominees. In fact, I trace my final break with progressive Democrats to the Robert Bork confirmation hearings and subsequent floor vote rejection, and ironically Ted Kennedy had a leading role in that. [I say "ironically" because just a few years earlier I went to the Houston Democratic precinct caucuses to support Kennedy's bid against Carter's renomination in 1980. I am horrified today to look at Kennedy's platform then, including national health care and wage-and-price controls, things that are inconsistent with my current conservative principles; I think I was responding more towards Kennedy's ideals than his policies and a general dissatisfaction with Jimmy Carter.]
[However, I will give Kennedy credit for being an honest broker, unlike Barack Obama. For instance, in the 2007 immigration reform compromise, Ted Kennedy agreed to concessions for a temporary worker program, which organized labor bitterly opposed, and stood by the concessions when fellow Democrats attempted to strip it from the bill, just like McCain and others stood by concessions to the Democrats.]
Kennedy and the Character Issue
I do wonder how difficult it was to be Ted Kennedy; his oldest brother Joseph died a war hero during WWII, and his slain brothers President John Kennedy and Senator Bobby Kennedy cast a long shadow: how do you establish your own legacy? As a Catholic boy growing up, I saw John Kennedy, the first Catholic President, as a role model; I think a number of us, perhaps unrealistically and unfairly, wanted to see Ted Kennedy as an extension of his brothers' legacy.
Ted Kennedy's involvement in the circumstances of the 1969 tragic drowning death of Mary Jo Kopechne, a former secretary to Bobby Kennedy, at Chappaquiddick cast a shadow over his political career and was probably the leading reason why he never became President. This was an issue for me even during my salad days of progressive politics (except for a consistent pro-life stand). Ted Kennedy's explanations for the events never convinced me, his delay in reporting the accident was legally and morally unacceptable, Judge Boyle himself concluded some of Kennedy's story was untrue, and a number of independent articles (not partisan rants) have raised serious issues with Kennedy's account. As a matter of opinion, I also felt that there were double standards at play, that the politically powerful Kennedy name made a difference.
I was somehow hopeful that Ted Kennedy, facing his mortality under brain cancer, would come clean in the end and give the Kopechne family some long-awaited closure. But I think, as always, Kennedy's first instinct was political survival and in this case trying to protect his own legacy.
Final Thoughts
Ted Kennedy was a powerful orator and, in my judgment, the most effective, consistent, articulate, persuasive spokesman for conventional progressive politics; he differed from Barack Obama in the sense he had never attempted to mask his progressive ideology under some sophistical fuzzy moderation.
However, Ted Kennedy never really grasped the significance of the political backlash against the progressive movement--the Reagan landslides, the 1972 Nixon landslide, and the failures not only of his own national candidacy but those of his fellow Massachusetts progressives, Mike Dukakis and John Kerry. Like all progressives, he blamed election losses not on the innate shortcomings of his paternalist, elitist policies, but on failures to "educate" American voters on progressive principles, conservative "lies" and GOP "dirty tricks". Ted Kennedy was an unabashed believer in Big Government. To a certain extent, one has to give Barack Obama credit for his political insight that he could not sell himself as a progressive but had to disguise himself as a fuzzy post-partisan moderate, suggesting that he was open to offshore drilling when oil was selling at over $140/barrel last year, that he believed in the Second Amendment after the Supreme Court reaffirmed its fundamental meaning, and that he also believed in tax cuts.
