Teddy

by digby

I heard about the passing of Ted Kennedy last night just before I went to bed, and recalled that it was a year ago exactly that I’d seen him speak at the convention, a moving experience made more poignant by the knowledge at the time that he was unlikely to ever appear at another one. There’s been some time to prepare for his death, but it remains strange to think of the American political system without him.

I don’t think people who are much younger than I am can really imagine the meaning of “the Kennedys” in quite the way generations earlier do. My earliest political memory in life is sitting around one afternoon in 1960 with my mother’s friends and hearing them wax on about how “Jack” was so “cute.” This memory is odd to me, because for right wingers like my parents, JFK was the living example of everything they hated. But maybe my mother had secrets. In that era, women often did.

My father loathed the whole Kennedy family, but none more than the one he always called “Teddy” in the most derisive tone possible. In his mind, Teddy was some sort of hippie playboy or at the very least a lightweight among lightweights. (On one level, however, my dad loved him — Teddy’s “troubles” assuaged the guilt people like him felt over having hated the two martyred brothers so passionately in life.)

The Kennedys always pissed off the wingnuts to an absurd degree, and yet they never complained about it, even though they paid such a huge price for their public service. It’s one of the things I like the most about them.

Teddy himself was a fascinating figure in liberal politics. Although I was still in elementary school when JFK and RFK were assassinated, until I was nearly 30 I just assumed that Ted Kennedy was going to be president. It was as inevitable as the tide. I don’t think I ever questioned it until the extremely trying 1980 primary campaign, when it became clear to me that the moment had probably passed. I don’t think he did either.

But once it became clear, he didn’t just turn his seat into a sinecure or retreat into cynicism, he carried on valiantly, becoming one of the few master legislators in American history, insisting on making progress by hook or crook even during the long era of conservative rule in which he served. And he took the slings and arrows from his enemies along the way with humor, dignity and class.

John McCain said the other day that Kennedy’s great gift was in making concessions to Republicans. That may be correct, but not in the way McCain meant it to be. Kennedy’s great gift was fighting for progress without shame or obfuscation, making the moral argument for liberalism, and always trying to move the ball forward, inch by inch if that’s all he could get and in great leaps if the opportunity presented itself. If he made the right concessions, it sure as hell wasn’t in service of McCain’s pinched and cruel agenda.

He was everything the conservatives hate: a proud, fighting liberal who didn’t shirk from the label. Each day his presence was a rebuke to everything they believed in. So when you hear the inevitable lugubrious paeans from the right over the next few days, keep in mind that their movement and its people spent the last 40 years treating Ted Kennedy the way they treat Barack Obama today — with utter, single-minded contempt.

And all the while, Kennedy just kept going, getting more concessions from Republicans by being true to his principles than mealy mouthed centrism ever did. There’s a lesson in that.

.