It’s been about a week since the news broke about Ted Kennedy’s medical condition, and the initial flood of pre-obituary tributes and emotional responses has had a chance to wane a bit. Now the pundits and bloggers have moved on to write about what’s next, and many, particularly those Democrat-friendly types, have come to a somewhat obvious, though reasonable, observation: that Hillary Clinton should take a page from Ted’s book and settle into her Senate seat rather than spend the remainder of her political career keeping her options open about running for president.

I, personally, agree with this idea 100%. A long Senate career like Kennedy’s gives a politician so much more opportunity to play a role in shaping the future of the country than the comparably-short tenure one has in the White House. If Ted Kennedy had won the Democratic nomination in 1980 and had gone on to somehow beat Ronald Reagan, he would have disappeared from the active scene in Washington twenty years ago, to while away the time sailing and carousing (I doubt he would have sobered up if he’d retired to private life years ago). Instead, he has accomplished more than many of his contemporaries on either side of the aisle and will leave the Senate with a genuinely well-earned reputation as one of the great legislators.

Timothy Noah at Slate took the time in this piece to clarify some of the misconceptions around the idea of Kennedy’s post-1980 career. It wasn’t until 1985, after Reagan’s landslide re-election, that Ted Kennedy actually publicly announced that he would give up his presidential ambitions. Many pundits and bloggers have created the impression that Kennedy made his announcement after the 1980 campaign, but he did briefly consider running in 1984. I don’t know that those five years make a huge difference in the grand scheme of things — Noah seems to be trying to make more of this particular fact than it really is. His decision was as much a milestone for the political scene of the late 1960s and 1970s as Lyndon Johnson’s decision not to run in 1968. The pundito-bloggers are just compressing time in their own memories. The parallels between the Carter-Kennedy campaign of 1980 and the Obama-Clinton campaign of 2008 are strong and clear, and Hillary Clinton has the fortune of a historical model to help her lay the foundation for her political future.

The Clintons have done a lot to erode their political capital with the general public through this election season, just as our collective memory was getting ready to solidify around a much more forgiving vision of the Bill Clinton administration. While they don’t seem to have alienated too many people in the party’s power echelons as much, those movers and shakers will be far more swayed by public opinion against the Clintons if they make any obvious movement toward a 2012 campaign. They have more to lose than to gain at this point. Saving what face they can by easing up on the fight going into the convention will be enough salve for now, but if Hillary Clinton is truly interested in helping her “base” of working-class Democrats and not just serving her own ego, then she should stay in the Senate for at least a couple more terms. Four years from now, when we are all rueing the day we voted for Barack Obama or John McCain, she’ll have more seniority and more power than either of them, and probably a better legacy.