A common theme runs through most of the official testimonials and press commentaries on Senator Edward (Ted) Kennedy... While acknowledging that the senator’s death closes a chapter in American politics, the eulogies focus on the most insignificant period of his long career.
Ted Kennedy, so runs the story line, really came into his own when he abandoned his presidential aspirations, recognized that there would never be another Kennedy administration, and found a way to work within the limits of a right-wing political environment hostile to New Deal/New Frontier/Great Society-style reformism...
Conservative columnist David Brooks of the New York Times described Kennedy as “The Great Gradualist.” Times writer Sam Tanenhaus, in a retrospective entitled “In Kennedy, the Last Roar of the New Deal Liberal,” criticized Kennedy’s “intemperate denunciation of Judge Robert H. Bork in 1987,” and condemned his attempt to unseat incumbent Democratic President Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential primaries as his “gravest miscalculation.”
Similarly, the Los Angeles Times in an editorial on Sunday bemoaned Kennedy’s “ill-considered campaign for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination” and his “hyperbolic warning that confirming Robert H. Bork for the Supreme Court would usher in the return of segregated lunch counters and back-alley abortions...”
In fact, both episodes were among the more principled moments in Kennedy’s career...
Nearly a half-century has passed since John F. Kennedy announced his candidacy for the presidency...at roughly the mid-point between the election of Woodrow Wilson in 1912 and the election of Barack Obama in 2008.
In announcing his candidacy, Kennedy declared that he would, if elected, provide answers to the following crucial issues: “
ow to rebuild the stature of American science and education; how to prevent the collapse of our farm economy and the decay of our cities; how to achieve, without further inflation or unemployment, expanded economic growth benefiting all Americans; and how to give direction to our traditional moral purpose...
When he delivered this speech, Kennedy viewed himself as a politically moderate representative of a liberal capitalist “progressive” tradition that had been inaugurated by Woodrow Wilson. We now know that the Kennedy administration, which ended with the assassination in Dallas, marked the beginning of the protracted death agony of that tradition...
...the cause of social reform was abandoned, the hope was dead, and the dream, whatever it was, continued only as an illusion.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/sep2009/pers-s01.shtml
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