Earlier this year, when the health care reform bill finally made it through Congress, Representative Patrick Kennedy left this little card at the gravesite of his father, Senator Ted Kennedy. The card reads “Dad — The Unfinished Business is done”. Universal health care was the grand cause of the last thirty years of Ted Kennedy’s career, and his death at this time last year came just as the final battle for passage was beginning.
Charlie Pierce (or Charles P. Pierce, as he is usually styled in print), who writes mainly for the Boston Globe, wrote this blog post for Esquire magazine on the anniversary of Ted Kennedy’s death, asking a very real and very important question: who exactly will step up to the plate and be the voice of liberal conscience in the enormous void left by Kennedy’s death? A pullquote:
The former could be replaced, and has been, most notably by a president whose official crest ought to be half-a-loaf of bread, and who now finds himself battling the forces not only of an intractable political opposition, but also the undeniable power of clear and uncompromising public bullshit. It is the latter Teddy that this president needed the most but, looking around at his putative allies within his own party, and assuming that the president is unwilling or unable to do it himself, there was nobody willing or able to step into the role. While it was unquestionably surprising that Kennedy was replaced in the Senate by a stealth Republican named Scott Brown, it is altogether shocking that he has yet to be replaced within his own party by someone willing to be the obstreperous lefty voice to counter an increasingly shrill and increasingly manic Republican Right.
There is an enormous amount of unfinished business to be accomplished, and yet once again the noise machine of the right has brought everything to a (literally) screeching halt over building a “mosque” (or, what Pierce equally mischaracterizes as a “culinary school”; it is neither) two blocks away from the World Trade Center, and STILL not one progressive leader can find a spine or a set of testicles to put the howler monkeys in their place and get refocused on problems far more likely to sink us all than the opening of a cultural center. The vacuum of leadership in this country is palpable, and with each passing day the lack of a strong countervalent force to undo the machinations of the right draws us to a point of no return into chaos. I don’t think that the presence of Ted Kennedy would be the only thing forestalling that, but clearly the role he played was critical and can’t go unfilled much longer. I just wish I had the slightest idea who might do that.
(tip o’ the hat to blog-buddy Steve for clueing me in on the Pierce post)
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