Aug 26 2009
The best tribute to Teddy Kennedy is universal health care
There’s nothing substantive I can add to the lengthy list of tributes to the late Sen. Ted Kennedy today, and since you can read all of them you want at every news site out there, I won’t bother linking to them. Two things:
1. Kennedy is a perfect example of the fact that even the best among us have feet of clay. People in general tend to deify the recently deceased, except for those who don’t like him or her, and then they go spelunking through the public record looking for anything embarrassing they can use against that person. So yeah, Chappaquiddick, drinking, womanizing, and don’t forget he cheated on a Spanish test once at Harvard. But his history as a hard-working senator who genuinely tried to make the lives of ordinary people better through legislation, and did so by converting his conservative opponents to his viewpoint, pretty much outweighs all of that. Kennedy had no reason to be a champion of the working class, given his silver-spoon upbringing and his never having to wonder where his next paycheck was coming from. But he was. He recognized that it was his life and background that was the outlier in American life, and that his good fortune was built on the backs of millions of only moderate, or lesser, means. Some folks regarded him as a class traitor for these very reasons, he knew it, and he didn’t give a shit — he knew what was right and what was wrong, and he recognized that he had done a lot of things in his life that were wrong. And he moved forward from there to find his way back to the right side of the street.
2. One of Ted’s signature causes throughout his career was universal health care. He introduced a bill on that topic in 1969 and pressed forward incrementally on that front at every opportunity. A smart person, let’s say an Ivy League-educated president who got his current job in part because of Ted’s endorsement in the primaries, would grab onto Ted’s HELP committee version of health care reform, demand it be renamed the Sen. Edward M. Kennedy Memorial Bill For Universal Health Insurance Coverage In America, and ramrod it through both houses of Congress. Of course, it would be co-sponsored by such notorious bipartisan fakers as Sen. Charles Grassley and Ted’s good friend Sen. Orrin Hatch, and with such support it should fly through Congress on a voice vote. Does this sound opportunistic? Sorry, politics throughout history has been influenced by emotion. The immediate metaphor is when Lyndon Johnson pushed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts through Congress using the memory of our dear departed president and Ted’s brother John F. Kennedy. And I shouldn’t have to remind anybody that civil rights for black Americans was just as controversial in 1964 as health care reform is today — and that one side depended upon fear, prejudice, dishonesty and general resistance to change in 1964 just as one side is doing now.
You know what I haven’t really thought about that but that’s a really good point I hope that the congresses uses his death and his memory to push this bill through congress and they follow through with this in his honor….I think the country would be alot better off……
Enjoyed your article Sal. I do not care one bit for Ted Kennedy but I do enjoy reading how everyone has tried to white-wash his life and record. As far as the civil rights issue you mentioned at the end of the article, many folks don’t know how the Dems and Repubs voted on that.
The vote breakdown: Repubs (the minority) voted 138YEA to 34NAY; Dems (the majority) voted 152 YEA-96 NAY. http://www.congresslink.org/print_basics_histmats_civilrights64text.htm
Trying to link civil rights with health care is a tactic that doesn’t pass the smell test. Lyndon Johnson had a terrible record on civil rights and JFK voted againsts civil rights legislation in 1957. Wonder why so many Dems voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and today try to proclaim that their party is responsible for its passage????
Compare apples to oranges much, Scotty?
The ideological composition of the two parties 45 years ago was a hell of a lot different than it is today. Paul Krugman wrote this today:
“Moderate Republicans, the sort of people with whom one might have been able to negotiate a health care deal, have either been driven out of the party or intimidated into silence. Whom are Democrats supposed to reach out to, when Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who was supposed to be the linchpin of any deal, helped feed the “death panel” lies?”
There were such things as moderate and even liberal Republicans in those days. Today the party isn’t just conservative, it’s batshit-crazy right wing. Grassley is endorsing Glenn Beck’s book in public. The liberal equivalent would be Nancy Pelosi speaking warmly of Code Pink, and they hate the Speaker’s guts. There are only a couple of GOP moderates left in the Senate and a couple of others — Arlen Spector and Lincoln Chafee — left the Republicans recently.
As to 45 years ago, practically every Southern Democrat was opposed to civil rights. There’s no mystery about that. The Democratic party became entrenched as the South’s majority party by opposing civil-rights Republicans, who actually got a lot of black people elected to office in the years after the Civil War. But it was two Democratic presidents who made the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts a priority, one of whom was himself a Southern Democrat. By the way, what happened to a lot of those anti-civil rights Democrats after those bills passed? They switched to the Republican party, and the South became a Republican stronghold in response to civil rights legislation. Today the Democratic party is composed in the main of moderates and liberals, with even a few conservative members, at least as many conservative Dems as there are moderate Republicans.
So whatever point you’re trying to make there has been bypassed by history. Most of the Republican votes in favor of civil rights came from New England, the middle Atlantic states and the West Coast, particularly California. You may be more familiar with the term we use to describe those areas now: BLUE STATES!
You made the statement at the end of your article trying to link opposition to health care and civil rights. Just stating the facts.
I don’t see where you conclude that I backed away from that metaphor. The fear and loathing behind separate water fountains springs from the same source as all the lies being told about health care reform — the fake “death panels,” the lies about Medicare being plundered, not to mention all the Hitler talk at what is supposed to be health care town halls. Your claim that you were “just stating the facts” about Democrats being against civil rights, by contrast, left out a lot of context, which I provided for you in my previous response.