An American Lion

Bring Out Your Dead “Monty Pythom and the Holy Grail” 1975

It took a while, but it’s time to shame liberals and progressives by bringing out the dead:

My late husband, Ted Kennedy, was passionate about health-care reform. It was the cause of his life. He believed that health care for all our citizens was a fundamental right, not a privilege, and that this year the stars — and competing interests — were finally aligned to allow our nation to move forward with fundamental reform. He believed that health-care reform was essential to the financial stability of our nation’s working families and of our economy as a whole.

Still, Ted knew that accomplishing reform would be difficult. If it were easy, he told me, it would have been done a long time ago. He predicted that as the Senate got closer to a vote, compromises would be necessary, coalitions would falter and many ardent supporters of reform would want to walk away. He hoped that they wouldn’t do so. He knew from experience, he told me, that this kind of opportunity to enact health-care reform wouldn’t arise again for a generation.

In the early 1970s, Ted worked with the Nixon administration to find consensus on health-care reform. Those efforts broke down in part because the compromise wasn’t ideologically pure enough for some constituency groups. More than 20 years passed before there was another real opportunity for reform, years during which human suffering only increased. Even with the committed leadership of then-President Bill Clinton and his wife, reform was thwarted in the 1990s. As Ted wrote in his memoir, he was deeply disappointed that the Clinton health-care bill did not come to a vote in the full Senate. He believed that senators should have gone on the record, up or down.

Ted often said that we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. He also said that it was better to get half a loaf than no loaf at all, especially with so many lives at stake. That’s why, even as he never stopped fighting for comprehensive health-care reform, he also championed incremental but effective reforms such as a Patients’ Bill of Rights, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and COBRA continuation of health coverage.

The reason we are here in the first place is because Senator Kennedy’s belief that we “cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good” became a farce, whereby he would sell his soul to craft phony legislation in order to move the goalposts. His legacy is a pile of compromise, whereby, he had his pockets picked by bigger phonies than himself. Lawmakers don’t even write the laws—lobbyists do. And when lawmakers act as if they’re creating something magical, that’s when I reach for my bullshit detector. And, brothers and sisters, my bullshit detector had a special setting for the senior Senator from Massachusetts.

Bringing out dead politicians is hardly an effective way to force a shit sandwich down the gullet. If Kennedy had been a stalwart who held to his principles, the laws and programs already in place would be doing far more than they currently do for the American people. In point of fact, his staffer now holds his Senate seat. Don’t tell me Kennedy’s staff didn’t write things. Don’t serve me that weak tea. Kennedy had decades where, with a Democratic majority and with two Democrats in the White House (Carter and Clinton), he could have done a great deal more. I believe it was old Gore Vidal who remarked that his legacy was nothing.

Sadly, his decision to try to run against Carter and to go pantsless and drunk while Clinton was in office sort of makes any effort to shame people into accepting incompetent mediocrity an exercise in navel gazing. Do you know what’s different nowadays? People are too goddamned smart to fall for these things. And yet, the establishment tries anyway. Boo hoo. The man is dead. He might have been a swell guy. But he’s nothing to wave around as an example of who to cherish and remember so that people will unclench their fists and give in.