Analysis:Kennedy left his mark on every major expansion of civil rights, healthcare and access to education
THIS WEEK, amid an increasingly bitter and rowdy public debate over President Barack Obama’s plan to reform healthcare, Arizona Republican John McCain suggested that things would be different if Ted Kennedy was still active in the Senate.
“Kennedy was,” McCain said, “as close to being indispensable as any individual I’ve ever known in the Senate” and his absence had allowed the debate over healthcare to stagnate.
“He had a unique way of sitting down with the parties at a table and making the right concessions, which really are the essence of successful negotiations,” McCain said.
“So it’s huge that he’s absent, not only because of my personal affection for him, but because I think the healthcare reform might be in a very different place today.”
McCain’s observation was a remarkable tribute to a politician whose name had for generations of Republicans been a byword for the big government values of liberal Democrats. Indeed, many Republican congressmen recalled yesterday that they had raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign funds by warning of the threat Kennedy presented to conservatism.
The Massachusetts senator wore the liberal label as a badge of honour, but after 47 years in the Senate during which he authored more than 2,500 pieces of legislation, he had earned a reputation as that chamber’s master of the judicious compromise.
For almost half a century, Kennedy left his mark on every major expansion of civil rights, healthcare and access to education. He championed the cause of oppressed people throughout the world, from South Africa to Chile and became the Senate’s most outspoken opponent of the wars in Vietnam and Iraq.
Despite the playboy lifestyle he enjoyed into late middle age, Kennedy was always the most diligent and patient of legislators who refused to abandon his chosen causes despite numerous setbacks.
Millions of American women, people with disabilities and members of ethnic minorities owe their protection from job discrimination to Kennedy. Before his illness last year, he was leading the Senate fight to extend similar protections to gays and lesbians.
Healthcare was, he often said, the cause of his life and Kennedy was the driving force behind every significant effort to expand coverage. In the 1990s, he worked with Bill and Hillary Clinton to provide healthcare to children but the goal of universal healthcare slipped from his grasp time and again.
Despite his reputation as the liberal lion of the Senate, Kennedy formed close friendships and legislative alliances with conservative Republicans. He worked with Utah senator Orrin Hatch to provide emergency aid to cities hit by the Aids epidemic in the 1980s and partnered with George W Bush to reform the education system and extend health benefits for the elderly (although he complained later that the former president betrayed the original purpose of the measures).
Kennedy’s biographer, Adam Clymer, suggested yesterday that the Massachusetts senator owed much of his success as a legislator to the fact that he came to the Senate at a time when business was conducted on a more personal basis. Staffs were smaller, debates were not televised, so personal contact between senators was essential.
Kennedy continued to operate according to the old rules throughout his career, dropping in on colleagues in their offices to discuss strategy or work out compromises.
Kennedy was also more willing than most of his Senate colleagues to defer to the expertise of others in various policy areas. Thus, from the time he first met and was impressed by the former SDLP leader in the early 1970s, Kennedy consulted John Hume before making pronouncements on Northern Ireland.
Under Hume’s influence, Kennedy’s instinctive support for the nationalist cause in the North became more nuanced, and he became a key figure in persuading Irish-Americans to abandon support for Noraid, which backed the IRA’s armed campaign.
Along with House speaker Tip O’Neill, senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, and New York governor Hugh Carey, Kennedy shaped a new US approach to the Northern conflict, which rejected violence but promoted an Irish dimension in the search for a peaceful settlement.
Kennedy remained closely engaged throughout the lengthy peace process in the North, advising US presidents and coaxing the Northern parties towards compromise.
As the Senate’s leading champion of immigration reform, along with McCain, Kennedy encouraged the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform in its campaign to regularise the status of Irish undocumented immigrants in the US.
During last year’s presidential campaign, Kennedy at first held back from endorsing either of the leading Democratic candidates, expressing admiration for both Obama and Clinton. His decision to back Obama represented a turning point in the Democratic primary battle as he explicitly passed the Kennedy torch to the young African-American.
Obama yesterday described Kennedy as “a colleague, a counsellor and a friend”, promising that “the extraordinary good he did” will live on.
As the president struggles to win approval for his healthcare reform, he hopes to fulfil at last the greatest legislative ambition of the lion of the senate.