With the passing of their last great champion, American liberals will have to decide whether it’s time to renew the fight or accept being sold out again.
If President Barack Obama wants to get his administration on track, he had better hope for the latter.
Liberals loved Ted Kennedy because he did not apologize for his liberalism or try to hide it under euphemisms. He made them feel good about their views, which he said were not just necessary, but right. The frustrations of 40 years of thwarted liberal aims thundered in his voice.
Whether he was savaging George W. Bush’s foreign policy or demanding an increase in the minimum wage, Kennedy didn’t sound like some knock-kneed progressive but a real, fire-eating liberal.
And when Democratic voters were vacillating between Hillary Clinton and Obama at the end of January 2008, Kennedy got them off their rumps.
“With Barack Obama, we will break the old gridlock and finally make health care what it should be in America — a fundamental right for all, not just an expensive privilege for the few,” Kennedy said to roars of approval at American University.
Kennedy did not say that “health insurance reform” was needed to “bend the cost curve” or that a government health plan was “just one sliver” of overall reform. He told Democrats that they were obliged to help people and to make the rich pay for the poor.
Kennedy promised that the freshman senator from Illinois who reminded him so much of his brother John was the one who could deliver on that vision.
The message from Kennedy resonated with Democrats who were tired of being sold out.
Bill Clinton’s presidency was hugely frustrating to liberals. They may reserve most of their ire for conservatives who rolled Clinton, but they know that Clinton’s weakness is what made it possible.
In 1980, Kennedy gave voice to similar frustrations when he opposed an incumbent president of his own party for failing to deliver on the goals liberals had nurtured since the death of JFK. Then, as now, health care for all was the central plank of the liberal platform.
His concession speech at the Democratic convention at Madison Square Garden that year — “not to argue as a candidate but to affirm a cause” — outlined the unmet goals of liberals of his generation, and it still rings in many ears today.
Those same rumblings are coming back on the Left, where folks are starting to question Obama’s competence and commitment to their goals.
The New York Times has detailed the way Tom Daschle flits between corporate health care clients and the White House — not lobbying but acting as a “resource.”
Conservatives are rankled that a man whose limo rides cost him a nomination as health secretary still gets to craft administration policy. But liberals hate the notion that the infamously sold-out Daschle still has a seat at Obama’s big table while on the drug company dole.
Washington Post style writer Manuel Roig-Franzia wrote a sickeningly sweet profile of the “It girl” of the Obama era, lobbyist Heather Podesta. Podesta bragged about her art, her wine cellar, her shoes and, most of all, her influence. It was a shockingly stupid move for someone supposed to be a savvy Washington player and may be the undoing of the best protection racket in town.
Podesta’s husband, Tony, and brother in-law, John, have major influence with administration and congressional policymakers and with liberal groups. Heather collects the checks.
The sense that the liberal dream is being sold out again has the Left up in arms, and the president has done little to reassure it.
There is some satisfaction that the administration may prosecute CIA agents for abusing terrorists, but when the next request for more troops to escalate the Afghan war comes in, happy thoughts about Eric Holder won’t prevent another uproar.
The calls are already pouring in for Congress to enact universal health care as a monument to the life and works of Ted Kennedy, and Obama will doubtless use Kennedy’s death as a way to try to re-engage Americans on the issue.
But nothing has changed in Congress, and Americans continue to recoil from a poorly crafted, ill-defined plan. That means Obama will have to get liberals to accept a smaller monument to Kennedy than they would like.
Obama’s in trouble if liberals ask: What would Teddy do?
