Tag Ted Kennedy

Only eight more shopping days until Election Day, kids! I’m going to make a sincere effort this week to post about things other than You-Know-What, but to do that I have to get all of these links out of my system.

Recently, I read someone saying somewhere that people might be surprised at what genuinely nice individuals most politicians are. That the majority of people who go into professional politics do so out of a genuine desire to be of service to other people, regardless of their ideology. Republicans AND Democrats alike — contrary to the vicious rhetoric currently employed by the Republicans. Sometimes that commitment to public service gets obscured by personal ambitions and political obligations, but not always. I think there’s no question that Barack Obama is one of those people who has held on to his personal sense of service, and I hope he is able to continue to do so after he assumes the office of President.

This brief article in the Washington Post’s Sunday magazine lets Dennis Kucinich explain his mission in his own words, and here again you can grasp the sincere desire to help other people, especially people who otherwise have no one to help them. That, friends, is the heart of liberalism (or “progressivism”, if you’re a wimp). Kucinich was practically alone among the Democratic candidates in staking his claim firmly in progressive soil, while Clinton and Obama wrestled over who could be the most like the Republicans. This was and is my biggest qualm with Obama — that while he is a decent person, he is too easily swayed by the political wind. I do not have that sense at all about Dennis Kucinich, and that is why he’ll get my vote next week and why I will continue to support him in the future. The now-embryonic Obama Administration would do well indeed to find a place for Dennis Kucinich and foster his political future so that he might have a realistic chance at the White House eight years hence.

This is Bernie Sanders, the independent Senator from Vermont. Bernie (he prefers to be called “Bernie”) has been in the Senate since the Democrats regained control of Congress in 2006, but he had been Vermont’s single representative in the House for 16 years before that. Bernie’s political affiliation is one of the most interesting ones in modern American politics. He’s listed as an “independent”, caucuses with (and votes with) the Democrats, and describes himself as a Socialist. Indeed, in his earlier days prior to being elected mayor of the city of Burlington, VT, he was a member of an anti-war fringe party, the very sort that William Ayers was involved with (minus the bombs, I guess).

During the years of Alan Greenspan’s chairmanship of the Federal Reserve, Bernie was a vocal critic of Greenspan. At the time, Greenspan was widely considered as a near-magical figure by Washington leaders, able to keep the long boom of the Clinton years rolling along with a single well-directed word in his oracular statements to Congress. Last week, Greenspan, now retired, returned to Congress, hat in hand, to admit that he had “made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organisations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms”. This is what Bernie had to say about that.

Bernie Sanders has also been among the few progressive voices (along with Kucinich) speaking out agains the Wall Street bailout, and calling quite vocally for the sort of reforms and public service programs that Franklin Roosevelt enacted at the beginning of his administration. Give ‘em hell, Bernie!

The only part of this summer’s Democratic National Convention that I watched was the night that Ted Kennedy spoke. The man pulled himself out of a hospital bed, was wheeled into the arena, and lifted himself from a wheelchair to walk to the podium to make that speech. The reports from his family continue to be positive, but there could not have been anyone who heard that speech who did not know in their hearts that it would be the last convention speech he’ll make.

Ted Kennedy still plans to return to the floor of the Senate when it reconvenes in January, and it does seem that he will make good on his pledge. The Washington Times (you know, the one run by the Moonies) ran this story last week that describes how Teddy is spending his recuperation time: by crafting a vast piece of legislation to bring his life-long goal of universal health care to the floor of the Senate. While both Barack Obama and John McCain have health care proposals in their platforms, both are fundamentally flawed in many ways. I think there’s more than a little reason to be afraid that President Obama would try to move quickly on his program, putting the issue to bed with a lackluster approach that will haunt us for decades. People who have met with Kennedy to discuss his plan call it a much better alternative to Obama’s plan; it has buy-in from all the assorted interests, and an Obama representative has been kept in the loop as a way to entice Obama to embrace this plan over his own.

This is the most important cause of Kennedy’s long political career, and perhaps the single greatest domestic issue facing this country other than the Wall Street meltdown. The sense is that many in Washington are willing to take this on seriously. One of the executives who runs the AARP says that the prevailing feeling is “Let’s do it for Ted.”

Amen to that.

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