Remember Ted Kennedy for Bork, not bipartisanship

Rest in peace Senator Kennedy, for all you endured. Reading the book-length New York Times obituary on my iPhone this morning on the subway, I couldn’t help but feeling mournful for all he really had been through. So many of the tragedies in his life — the death of one brother in war, the murders of two brothers, his plane crash, the untimely deaths of nephews, the death of Mary Jo Kopechne — may have laid another man very low. They never stopped Kennedy, and it’s remarkable to think that we don’t associate much in the last 40 years of his storied life with tragedy.

But there was one major moment of defeat in the years after that night in Chappaquiddick: his stillborn effort to defeat incumbent President Jimmy Carter in the 1980 Democratic presidential primary. Kennedy won major primaries in New York and California, but as was the case in last year’s Obama-Hillary match-up, it wasn’t enough to carry him past the incumbent’s momentum, which ultimately resulted in the Reagan era.

So it’s interesting to think about his “the dream shall never die” speech, which is on loop today. Here’s a clip from the 1980 Democratic National Convention:

The thing is, in the 29 years since Kennedy gave that speech, that Democratic Party dream for which Kennedy became the standard-bearer perhaps came closer to ‘dying’ than he might have expected it to in 1980. Ronald Reagan blew Jimmy Carter out of the water and instituted changes to government that are still being felt today; in spite of all of Kennedy’s legislative accomplishments on civil rights in the 1980s, Reagan’s people came back with the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork, a man who might have contributed mightily to the judicial undoing of everything that Kennedy fought for over the course of his career.

Faced with that prospect, the Kennedy everyone keeps lionizing for reaching across the aisle in a bipartisan manner didn’t mince words. Here he was on the Senate floor in 1987:

And some more from the confirmation hearing (which the jerkazoids at ABC News won’t let me embed).

When Senator Kennedy saw a threat to everything he had sought, he didn’t take a bipartisan approach. So it’s interesting that so much of what Kennedy is lauded for these days is not being the “liberal lion,” but that he reached across the aisle and worked with his Republican colleagues on a wide variety of issues.

And that’s been made relevant at a moment when we are seeing an absolute breakdown over health care. In this moment in which Congressional Republicans are stoking partisan fires to intimidate moderate and conservative Democrats away from progress on health care reform, Kennedy’s name has been invoked on quite a few occasions. “Oh,” the cloak room antics from a number of Senate Republicans have gone, “If Teddy were only here, perhaps this would be a kinder, gentler debate.” See our Rick Ungar for a good run down of this tactic.

Teddy isn’t coming back now; he’s gone, and America misses him already. And that is going to snatch away the “we need Kennedy to be less partisan” excuse from Senators Hatch, McCain, and so on. The partisan obstructionism will now be shown in all of its glory, and I don’t think the bipartisan Kennedy would have been the one we’d be seeing if he was in the Senate for the struggle that will occur in the months ahead.

What’s happening to health care reform in this country would make Kennedy as angry as he was about the prospect of a Justice Bork undoing all of his hard work from the Supreme Court bench. Consider this statement from his Newsweek essay earlier in the summer:

I tried to negotiate an agreement with President Carter but became frustrated when he decided that he’d rather take a piecemeal approach. I ran against Carter, a sitting president from my own party, in large part because of this disagreement. Health reform became central to my 1980 presidential campaign: I argued then that the issue wasn’t just coverage but also out-of-control costs that would ultimately break both family and federal budgets, and increasingly burden the national economy. I even predicted, optimistically, that the business community, largely opposed to reform, would come around to supporting it.

If Kennedy was willing to unseat his own president over health care, imagine how he’d deal with senators in his own party and from the opposition who were holding up the legislation we’ll get sometime this fall?

And while in the short-term, the Democrats can only reasonably count on 59 votes in the Senate for their legislation, it’s worth keeping in mind that 7 Republicans joined the 51 Democrats who voted against Bork. Kennedy’s lack of willingness to pull his punches on Bork’s nomination contributed to the atmosphere that flipped those Republicans and kept Bork off the Court. If there are Democrats who sincerely want real health care reform to pass the Senate, that is the spirit they should channel in the months ahead.