Sen. Edward Kennedy (1932-2009)

The president spoke about Senator Kennedy this

morning at Blue Heron Farm in Chilmark, MA.

"My heart and soul weeps at the loss of my best friend in the Senate, my beloved friend, Ted Kennedy."

-- West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd, in a statement

by Ken

Both Howie and I find ourselves with little to say regarding the only-too-expected news of the death of Sen. Edward Kennedy. Most of the things there are to be said are already being said. Howie gathered a number of links.

Here's Senator Byrd (as reported by Michael O'Brien for The Hill), the only member of the Senate who's been there longer than Senator Kennedy, and himself in seriously poor health, expressing hope for passage of a good health care reform bill that will bear his old friend's name:

"I had hoped and prayed that this day would never come," Byrd said in a statement. "My heart and soul weeps at the loss of my best friend in the Senate, my beloved friend, Ted Kennedy."

Byrd's wistful statement focused on the work accomplished with Kennedy during decades together in the Senate, and called on the healthcare bill before Congress to be renamed in honor of Kennedy.

"In his honor and as a tribute to his commitment to his ideals, let us stop the shouting and name calling and have a civilized debate on health care reform which I hope, when legislation has been signed into law, will bear his name for his commitment to insuring the health of every American," Byrd said.

Here's the great Jack Newfield, who died in 2004, writing in The Nation in 2002 ("The Senate's Fighting Liberal," a sensational piece they've appropriately reposted), recalling the just-turned-30 Kennedy arriving in the Senate in 1962, when "most pundits saw him as a dummy who had cheated on an exam at Harvard to stay eligible for football":

Now, forty years later, Ted Kennedy looks like the best and most effective senator of the past hundred years. He has followed the counsel of his first Senate tutor, Phil Hart of Michigan, who told him you can accomplish anything in Washington if you give others the credit. Kennedy has drafted and shaped more landmark legislation than liberal giants like Robert Wagner, Hubert Humphrey, Estes Kefauver and Herbert Lehmann.

Here's a bit of what the president had to say this morning:

The Kennedy name is synonymous with the Democratic Party. And at times, Ted was the target of partisan campaign attacks. But in the United States Senate, I can think of no one who engendered greater respect or affection from members of both sides of the aisle. His seriousness of purpose was perpetually matched by humility, warmth, and good cheer. He could passionately battle others and do so peerlessly on the Senate floor for the causes that he held dear, and yet still maintain warm friendships across party lines.

And that's one reason he became not only one of the greatest senators of our time, but one of the most accomplished Americans ever to serve our democracy.

On OpenLeft, our friend Mike Lux, stressing that "I take history very seriously" and "I am not given to hyperbole, declares Kennedy "The Greatest Senator in American History."

In this White House photo, President Obama and Senator Kennedy walked on the grounds of the White House before signing of the Kennedy Service Act at the SEED School in Washington, DC, on April 21 of this year.

We come now to my contribution. I'm mad.

Monday night on Countdown Keith Olbermann was talking to MSNBC commentator Lawrence O'Donnell Jr. about the possibility that Democrats have figured out that they may have to do the health care battle on their own. At one point, Keith noted: "For sheer egregiousness, the two senators invoking Ted Kennedy‘s name into this, I‘d like your reaction to that." And I got the feeling that O'Donnell, who normally shows so little emotion, was mad too:

Well, this is kind of shocking. Orrin Hatch and John McCain both saying that if Ted Kennedy were here, we would have a deal, they would be able to work out a deal with him. This strikes me as them both just trying to portray themselves as reasonable men who could do business with another reasonable man.

They both voted against—they‘ve already voted on this—they voted against the Kennedy bill in the Kennedy committee, in the health, education, labor, and pensions committee. They‘ve had a bill, they voted against it.

That bill was conceived of by Chairman Kennedy. He wasn‘t there at the time of the votes. Chris Dodd was there getting it through the committee for Chairman Kennedy. The chairman made his wishes known very clearly.

John McCain, a member of the committee, Orrin Hatch a member of the committee could have tried to work with Senator Kennedy at the beginning and they rejected that possibility.

Fifteen years ago, Orrin hatch was also on both the Kennedy committee and the Senate Finance Committee where I was working. He voted against the Kennedy bill that came through the Kennedy committee then. He then personally complained to me about how ugly and partisan the process was, run by Senator Kennedy, in Senator Kennedy‘s committee. And he was hoping that we would do a more bipartisan process in the finance committee, which we did do.

But Orrin Hatch was not part of anything Ted Kennedy tried to do on this, 15 years ago, and nothing that he tried to do this year. Same thing with John McCain. I don‘t know why they said that. They know that they didn‘t at any moment engage in real negotiations with Senator Kennedy this year.

This is just one of many moments lately when you wish Republicans were acquainted with the wise old virtue of keeping your damned mouth shut. It's true that once upon a time Senator Kennedy was often able to work with Republicans. (The Newfield Nation piece is especially rewarding on this count.) But as O'Donnell points out, his Republican "friends" were also perfectly capable of giving him the finger, and in the current Congress the "Just Say No" Republicans were saying no to him as surely as they were to any other Democrat.

Noah dug up this clip of Senator Kennedy on Jan. 25, 2007, dealing with Republican efforts to block a long-overdue increase in the minimum wage. "He starts off calm but gets very passionate," Noah writes. "It's a great little speech from a man who had a rare combo of being very, very wealthy AND caring for working people and their families. No Republican he!"




UPDATE: Howie Explains Why
He Finally Broke Down And Wept

I cried today, not when I woke up at 5 and heard that Senator Kennedy had passed away. Everyone passes away-- and few who have been so recognized for the selflessness with which he has serviced his country. I wept today when I watched the video Noah dug up (above) and heard Senator Kennedy thundering in a speech about a modest cost of living increase for minimum wage workers. "What is the price," he shouted, "that you want from these working men and women? What cost? How much more do we have to give to the private sector and to business? How many billion dollars more are you asking-- are you requiring? When does the greed stop, we ask the other side... what is it about it that drives you Republicans crazy? What is it about working men and women that you find so offensive?"

He shamed them-- almost all of them. In the end all but Tom Coburn (R-OK), Jim DeMint (R-SC) and Jon Kyl (R-AZ) voted in favor. But the delaying tactics-- they never stopped and right to the bitter end the slimiest of Republican bribe takers, many of them millionaires by dint of their "service" to the corporations who pay them to betray their own constituents threw whatever they had into the battle against economic security for the very American working families (and our economy) they're supposedly protecting. Burr, Coburn, DeMint, Vitter, Isakson are all up for re-election next year. I wonder how many voters in North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Georgia will be voting to re-elect these monstrosities based on the barrage of lies spewing out of the corporate media on behalf of the elites that oppress them. Do you think our silver-tongued president could ever give a speech so powerful, so moving and so effective like the one Kennedy delivered on the Senate floor?


2ND UPDATE: OUR FRIEND BALAKIREV OFFERS
A SPLENDID MEMORIAL TO SENATOR TED

I'm taking the liberty of pulling this comment out of the comments section. -- Ken

Watch Kurosawa's great film, Ikiru. It's all about a middle ranking bureaucrat who discovers he has inoperable cancer, and decides to push through a project that's been banging around the office for a long time: getting a small children's playground built. He faces all the shit you'd expect in various ways along the way, but it goes through, and there's this one brilliant scene towards the end where we see him, in the rain, at night, swinging on a screen, and laughing to the sky.

I thought of that will to do good in that precise film when Kennedy's death was announced. He was always thinking of new ways to benefit the US. It was never about pride or greed. It was always about finding a myriad of ways to push things to do good--and if most of them died in the Senate, what got through must have made him feel like that bureaucrat who finally accomplished something for everybody.

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