End of the Kennedy Legend

If his widow had run for Ted Kennedy's seat, would she have won yesterday's election?

Although Victoria Reggie Kennedy had spent a lifetime in politics and, on the weekend of the wake, showed unusual poise and grace, the Senator's widow rebuffed all suggestions that she run for his seat in a special election to be his proxy in passing legislation for what he called "the cause of my life."

In what would truly have been the last hurrah for the Kennedy dynasty, Tea Party rage would have been tested against half a century of Massachusetts love and loyalty for the family that dominated its politics for so long.

One left-handed indicator of what might have happened can be seen in the robocalls for Libertarian Joe Kennedy (no relation) meant to draw Democratic loyalists away from voting for Martha Coakley. Even in their absence, the Kennedys counted.

Scott Brown insisted he was not running for the "Kennedy seat" but, faced with defeating the Senator's widow, he would probably have ended up as luckless as Ted Kennedy's first opponent in 1962, who pictured him as a 30-year-old novice who would not impress voters if he were running as Edward Moore rather than Edward Moore Kennedy. But as the brother of the President and Attorney General and heir on his mother's side to colorful "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, Ted Kennedy won easily and kept winning for the rest of the century.

But this time Victoria Reggie Kennedy did not choose to run and, after the unhappy experience that followed her show of interest in replacing Hillary Clinton, neither did Caroline Kennedy or any of her cousins.

For Democrats in the White House and Congress, it was an inopportune time for the Kennedy legend to end, but as JFK might have pointed out to them, "Life is unfair."

Obama Throws Down the Gauntlet

If passion, eloquence and moral gravity were the main currency of American politics, Barack Obama would have changed the course of the health care debate tonight.

But with Washington as it is, the President could hope for no more than to restore some sanity by calling out the opposition for its "scare tactics," indicting insurance companies for greed and evoking the "large-heartedness" of Ted Kennedy's efforts for universal coverage as "not a Republican or a Democratic feeling" but "part of the American character."

After a summer of public discontent and falling approval numbers, Obama abandoned his disastrous hands-off approach to the legislation by firmly outlining what he wants.

From here on, the White House will be calling the signals for Congressional Democrats and, in time-honored tradition, making party loyalty an issue in the effort to use its majority effectively.

The President declared that "the time for bickering is over. The time for games has passed. Now is the season for action. Now is when we must bring the best ideas of both parties together, and show the American people that we can still do what we were sent here to do. Now is the time to deliver on health care...

"I will not waste time with those who have made the calculation that it's better politics to kill this plan than improve it. I will not stand by while the special interests use the same old tactics to keep things exactly the way they are. If you misrepresent what's in the plan, we will call you out. And I will not accept the status quo as a solution. Not this time. Not now...

"I understand that the politically safe move would be to kick the can further down the road--to defer reform one more year, or one more election, or one more term.

"But that's not what the moment calls for. That's not what we came here to do. We did not come to fear the future. We came here to shape it."

Barack Obama has thrown down the gauntlet to Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and their fractious factions. Now they will have to pick it up and meet the challenge.

Media Wake, Biden Tears

The etiquette of celebrity death brings the usual talking heads--calculating Orrin Hatch on PBS, loathsome Joe Lieberman on Larry King--with me-me-me tributes to Ted Kennedy but largely unseen is Joe Biden with an authentic outpouring of human grief.

In an era when empathy is an accusation, the Vice President is an anachronism--a politician often demeaned right and left for speaking his mind and heart, exposing himself to political ridicule.

Yesterday morning, in a routine appearance at the Department of Energy, Biden could not suppress tears along with memories of a friendship that endured for decades:

"He stood with me when my wife and daughter were killed in an accident. He was on the phone with me literally every day in the hospital, my two children were attempting, and, God willing, thankfully survived very serious injuries. I'd turn around and there would be some specialist from Massachusetts, a doc I never even asked for, literally sitting in the room with me."

Biden was 29 when he came to the Senate, Kennedy had been 30. "He and I were talking after his diagnosis," the Vice President recalled. "And I said, I think you're the only other person I've met who...is more optimistic, more enthusiastic, more idealistic, sees greater possibilities after 36 years."

Although Kennedy improved the lives of millions, Biden recalled, he "never was petty. He was never small. And in the process...he made everybody he worked with bigger--both his adversaries as well as his allies.

"Don't you find it remarkable that one of the most partisan, liberal men in the last century serving in the Senate had so many of his foes embracing him, because they know he made them bigger, he made them more graceful by the way in which he conducted himself?"

In many ways, Ted Kennedy will be irreplaceable, but Joe Biden remains as an exemplar of truth-telling and passionate idealism.

The Kennedy Brother Who Died in Bed

At the age of twelve, he pestered his family to let him contribute to a memorial volume about his oldest brother, Joe, who had been lost in World War II. What Teddy Kennedy chose to remember was how, after hounding Joe into letting him crew in a sailboat race and failing to help him win, he found himself thrown into icy water, only to be lifted back up seconds later by his brother's strong arms.

That fierce Kennedy will to win, coupled with even fiercer family love, marked the life of the man who died today, the only one of four brothers to survive into old age and fulfill the promise of those other lives cut short by the violence of a world in which they never stopped competing.

Remembered by President Obama as "a great leader, who picked up the torch of his fallen brothers and became the greatest United States Senator of our time," Edward Moore Kennedy, for those who lived through those times, is also proof that redemption is possible, that there are second and even third acts in American lives.

Expelled from Harvard for cheating, becoming a Senator at 30 through nepotism, being disgraced by Chappaquiddick, Ted Kennedy overcame all that and more to morph in his last years into "the lion of the Senate," fighting fiercely for the rights of those with less privileged lives than his own.

Ironically, he leaves this world in a time of debate over the value of preserving lives indefinitely as a reminder that there is no expiration date on the human spirit. Ted Kennedy won't be here to vote on health care reform, but he will have made a vital contribution to what he called "the cause of my life."

The Politics of Attention Deficit Disorder

Six months of scrambling on all fronts--bank bailouts, economic stimulus, climate change--have brought the President lower approval ratings from a public suffering from crisis overload and left him needing a Hail Mary pass to score on his key issue.

"With skepticism about the president's health-care reform effort mounting on Capitol Hill--even within his own party," the Washington Post reports, "the White House has launched a new phase of its strategy designed to dramatically increase public pressure on Congress: all Obama, all the time.

"Senior White House aides promise 'an aggressive public and private schedule' for Obama as he presses his case for reform, including a prime-time news conference on Wednesday, a trip to Cleveland, and heavy use of Internet video to broadcast his message beyond the reach of the traditional media."

This test of presidential clout, coming up on a complex issue against the background of other trillion-dollar commitments that have still to bear fruit, leaves him exposed not only to Republicans with their simple-minded message of tax phobia and deficit fear but increasing anxiety among 2010-vulnerable Democrats who now sense a potential lack of visible progress on all fronts by next fall to keep them in office.

In this kind of ADD political climate, health care legislation lends itself to demagogues' cover on all sides, with providers "promising" non-binding new efforts to cut costs as Republicans line up with Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus to "back" a future public option for health insurance with trigger mechanisms that will never be pulled off.

This leaves the President having to resist the temptation to settle for small gains that can be claimed as victory but will leave the failed health-care system fundamentally unchanged.

As he embarks on this week's campaign, to get him into "Win one for the Gipper" mode, he may want to take to heart Ted Kennedy's valedictory in Newsweek, "The Cause of My Life," which retells the medical consequences from generations of the "Kennedy curse" and makes a passionate plea for universal health care now.

Moon Landing and Chappaquiddick

Forty years ago this weekend, two events marked the end of the Kennedy era--Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, as JFK had promised, and his brother Ted drove off a bridge at Chappaquiddick to signify the end of Camelot.

"I believe," President John F. Kennedy had told Congress the year Barack Obama was born, "that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth."

For those old enough to remember, that juxtaposition of Apollo 11 and Chappaquiddick will always mark the 1960s as a reminder of the essential truth about politics: high ideals being pursued by flawed human beings.

The jubilation over the moon landing ("one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind") was tempered back then by the trauma of a president's brother, and likely future candidate himself, involved in the death of a young woman and a scandal worsened by attempted coverups and a Nixonlike Checkers speech to save a political career.

Looking back 40 years later, does all this confirm Martin Luther King's contention that "the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice," as often cited now by the first African-American president in history?

Chappaquiddick destroyed Ted Kennedy's hopes for the White House and led to 40 years of honorable service in the Senate, ending now with a terminally ill man devoting his remaining strength to the cause of health care reform.

Are the Kennedys' moral books balanced? A Higher Power will have to make that judgment.

Health Care as a Right

The House proposal to raise taxes on the very rich to help cover health insurance for all brings into focus what has been a hidden issue in the debate until now: Should medical care be a right guaranteed to all by all, as education, safety in the streets and freedom from foreign invasion now are as part of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

If government pays for the schooling of Americans and their safety in the streets, is it any less logical to consider protection from life-threatening disease as a basic right rather than an individual choice?

"Tax is a four-letter word" with voters, says conservative Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson, pointing out that even families not in the top 1 percent "hope they're going to be there someday. So they don't necessarily think it's fair."

Even the Rightmost legislators and their constituents wouldn't propose privatizing the armed forces (pace Blackwater) and the nation's school systems but will argue that even partial public responsibility for saving lives in doctors' offices and hospital waiting rooms is unfair.

As the final showdown on health care reform comes closer, the President and his supporters are going to have to make that case against those who are still living with the Dickensian attitude that public responsibility for the poor ends with workhouses and prisons.

With Ted Kennedy's Senate committee now offering its own version of 21st century health care, that time is at hand.

Health Care Fallbacks

The Obama White House is waffling on the public option and making piecemeal deals with providers, as hospitals now agree to sacrifice $155 billion over 10 years toward the cost of insuring 47 million Americans without coverage.

With the Administration conceding it "won't draw a line in the sand" and citing the Bush prescription-drug benefit in 2003 as a precedent, real health care reform is receding into a politics-as-usual charade to give the illusion of Change while making marginal improvements.

Now, the catch phrase is "trigger mechanism" that would let a public plan come into play when "competition was judged to be lacking," an evasion of breathtaking vagueness.

With Ted Kennedy on the sidelines, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee is weakened in its efforts to push for an immediate public plan, but rhetoric is still strong.

Sen. Chuck Schumer is emoting: "If it's not there on day one, those of us who support a public option have a real problem with it."

Not exactly "We have just begun to fight," but with true reform approaching critical condition, the vital signs are growing weaker. Those who want to rage against the dying of the light had better make their voices heard soon.

Health Care Sellout

The table is set for the Senate to cut the heart out of health care reform, with an ailing Ted Kennedy pitted against Max Baucus, recipient of $3 million from the industry over five years with a platoon of former staff members working as lobbyists for them.

Unless the White House rallies constituents to rise up, the Senate sellout will come from lawmakers hiding behind surgical masks--so-called compromises that will effectively kill what the President has called a public plan "to keep the insurance companies honest."

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich lists some of them:

"One of their proposals is to break up the public option into small pieces under multiple regional third-party administrators that would have little or no bargaining leverage. A second is to give the public option to the states where Big Pharma and Big Insurance can easily buy off legislators and officials, as they've been doing for years. A third is bind the public plan to the same rules private insurers have already wangled, thereby making it impossible for the public plan to put competitive pressure on the insurers."

All these ploys, plus others to give lip service to a public option but keep it on ice indefinitely, are being lined up to placate voters but serve the interests of the health insurers' and medical providers' lobbies.

If the President is serious about Change, here is his chance to prove it by going head to head with the bought-and-paid-for Senators of both parties who are still playing their old games and counting on real health care reform as being too complicated for the American public to understand.

Nothing will shake up the power of Washington lobbyists more than an uprising on this issue, and the President will have to stand shoulder to shoulder with Ted Kennedy in what he told the Democratic Convention last summer is "the cause of my life."

Obama in the Operating Room

Today's joint statement by Sens. Max Baucus and Ted Kennedy promising to “seek common ground on health reform legislation” is, in essence, a declaration of war over inclusion of a public insurance plan to compete with private companies.

As chairmen of the two powerful committees shaping the legislation, Baucus (Finance) and Kennedy (Health, Education, Labor and Pensions) will be jousting over the core issue that the Obama Administration has been tap-dancing around but will eventually have to face head-on in what promises to be a serious test of the President's toughness and resolve.

After failing to get more than a glimmer of bipartisanship on the stimulus bill, the President up to now has been wooing both the health care establishment and its Republican mercenaries, but the public option (Medicare-for-all) is the deal-breaker he will eventually have to face.

Baucus' Finance Committee, to get Republican Chuck Grassley and his crew on board, has been bending over backward with compromises that would give lip-service to a public plan but "only if private insurance companies had not made meaningful, affordable coverage available to all Americans within several years."

Kennedy and 28 other senators are not buying that, insisting, as are large numbers of House Democrats, on a public plan in the bill that would be sent to Obama, who has said it is needed to “keep the private sector honest,” but thus far has signaled only his vaunted pragmatism if the eventual showdown materializes.

Today's statement is an attempt to put a Band-Aid over Senate differences, but health care reform is ready for the operating table and the Surgeon-in-Chief will have to decide soon about where and how deep to make the incision.

Ted Kennedy's Health Manifesto

For the coming political battle, the last Kennedy of his generation is sounding the trumpet for health care reform.

"Over the last year," he writes in a Boston Globe OpEd today, "I've seen our healthcare system up close. I've benefitted from the best of medicine, but I've also witnessed the frustration and outrage of patients and doctors alike as they face the challenges of a system that shortchanges millions of Americans."

In his manifesto, Kennedy hits all the notes of Obama's proposal for change and, albeit in a somewhat tentative way, for the highest of all. After promising more transparency in health insurance plans, negotiation for lower premiums and regulation to prevent denial of coverage for previously existing conditions, Kennedy writes:

"We're also hearing that some Americans want the choice of enrolling in a health insurance program backed by the government for the public good, not private profit--so that option will be available too."

That wording presages the crucial struggle to include a Medicare-for-all provision in the bill that would put pressure on private insurers to compete in the health care market instead of maximizing their profits.

Since his medical crisis last summer, Ted Kennedy has been fighting his own battle to survive. Now he clearly intends to leave a legacy that will give other Americans better odds in theirs.

"Change," he concludes, "is never easy, but the status quo is no longer acceptable to any except those who profit from the current broken healthcare system.

"We cannot afford to wait--or to fail. And we will do neither.

"And when successful reform takes hold, the American people will wonder what has taken us so long."

Ted Kennedy's Last Hurrah

He turns 77 tomorrow in a life much longer than those of his brothers Joe, Jack and Bobby, who died young and violently before he had reached the age of 40.

In four decades since then, Ted Kennedy has lived in the shadow of legends yet survived to make his own place in history, the last son of a generation "wired to be optimistic," as he tells a reporter today.

“That’s the way I was born and brought up,” he says. “That’s the way we’re dealing with the challenges we’re facing now.”

He is living his last days struggling against the ravages of a brain tumor but refusing to give up the political fight of his life in the Senate for universal health care. He collapsed at Barack Obama's inaugural lunch, but Ted Kennedy has spent his life coming back from setbacks.

"Since the diagnosis of his brain cancer last May," the New York Times reports, "Mr. Kennedy has been given all manner of tributes and testimonials, lifetime achievement awards, medals of honor and standing ovations. But even as those accolades have provided sweet solace--and even some dark humor--as he endures grueling treatments, Mr. Kennedy...has been intent on racing time rather than looking back on it."

In these days of fear and anxiety, he is a living reminder of how much Americans can endure and overcome. Ted Kennedy said it best himself at the Democratic convention last summer:

"As I look ahead, I am strengthened by family and friendship. So many of you have been with me in the happiest days and the hardest days. Together we have known success and seen setbacks, victory and defeat.

"But we have never lost our belief that we are all called to a better country and a newer world."

Happy Birthday, Senator.

Health Care on the Back Burner?

Some Democrats are still gun-shy about health care reform, dating back to the Clintons' fiasco in the early 1990s, according to House Majority Whip James Clyburn who, in a C-Span interview Sunday, said he doesn't anticipate comprehensive healthcare legislation in 2009.

Despite President Obama's campaign promises of universal coverage, Clyburn pointed to recent expansion of S-CHIP (State Children's Health Insurance Program) and proposed additional spending on community health centers as going "a long way to building a foundation upon which to build a universal access healthcare program.

"I would much rather see it done that way, incrementally, than to go out and just bite something you can't chew. We've been down that road. I still remember 1994."

Clyburn's reticence is an echo of what now seems like ancient history--the early incompetence of the Clinton White House, the health insurers' "Harry and Louis" TV commercials and the debacle that gave Newt Gingrich and his Contract With America control of Congress in the midterm elections.

If health care reform is to survive in the economic stimulus debate, Tom Daschle and the Obama Administration will have to depend on the Senate where Ted Kennedy and others seem more determined to keep Americans from suffering and dying "incrementally."

No Revolution for the Health Czar

As Tom Daschle was explaining his goals as the new "health czar" at a Senate confirmation hearing, one metaphor for the failed system was looking down at him from the dais.

If Ted Kennedy had been an average citizen with a brain tumor last July, he would most likely not be alive now to take part in what seems a serious attempt to confront the health-care mess that has been decades in the making.

Last summer, some medical ethicists were suggesting that Kennedy decline expensive end-of-life treatment in a system where health insurers consume one out of every three dollars for their overhead and profit. But Kennedy had the personal wealth and motivation to fight for his life, and in the coming months, will be a strong ally for the Obama Administration with Daschle leading its efforts to overhaul American health care.

In the Obama bipartisan mode, Daschle had Bob Dole at his side for the confirmation hearing and, despite his sound analysis of what’s wrong, will be trying to patch up the current system rather than scrap it and start fresh.

Unlike banks and auto makers, health insurers have not been not asking for taxpayer bailouts because they already have them. A report from the Government Accountability Office on Medicare Advantage plans shows, according to the radicals at the Wall Street Journal, that "privately administered plans are merely taxpayer-subsidized profit centers for insurers," raking in $3.36 billion in 2006.

Throughout the health care system, inefficiency and fraud are pervasive, and evidence keeps piling up not only about the uninsured but the underinsured who are going untreated in what is still the most prosperous nation in the world.

With all the upheaval over government intervention in hitherto sacredly private areas of the economy, it's well past time to take another long look at the only sane solution to health care, a single payer system that will direct dollars to doctors, hospitals and other providers rather than pencil-pushing profit centers devoted to denying treatment.

Connecting the Democratic Dots

The convention tonight spanned half a century from the possible Last Hurrah from a generation of privileged Kennedys who devoted themselves to the public good to the First Act of a new family with roots in poverty and prejudice aspiring to the same goal.

In their speeches, Ted Kennedy and Michelle Obama embodied common values that bridge differences of race, wealth and social advantages.

"We are told," Kennedy said, "that Barack Obama believes too much in an America of high principle and bold endeavor, but when John Kennedy called for going to the moon, he didn't say it's too far to get there. We shouldn't even try.

"Our people answered his call and rose to the challenge, and today an American flag still marks the surface of the moon...This is what we do. We reach the moon. We scale the heights. I know it. I've seen it. I've lived it. And we can do it again."

Michelle Obama talked about her children's future: "I think about how one day, they'll have families of their own. And one day, they--and your sons and daughters--will tell their own children about what we did together in this election.

"They'll tell them how this time, we listened to our hopes, instead of our fears. How this time, how this time, we decided to stop doubting and to start dreaming. How this time, in this great country--where a girl from the South Side of Chicago can go to college and law school, and the son of a single mother from Hawaii can go all the way to the White House--that we committed ourselves, we committed ourselves to building the world as it should be."

The Kennedys and the Obamas started out from different places in life, but this election has brought them together and, if tonight's speeches are any indication, they will connect with Americans of all backgrounds who want something better than what we have had so far in the 21st century.

Debating Kennedy's Life-and-Death Decision

His dramatic return this week to cast the deciding vote for a crucial Medicare bill brought tears and cheers in the US Senate, even as some medical ethicists question Ted Kennedy's decision to undergo life-prolonging (and expensive) surgery, chemotherapy and radiation.

On the New York Times Freakonomics blog, an internist involved in public health issues suggests Sen. Kennedy might have issued this statement instead:

“Because I am not a young man, the cancer in my brain will progress rapidly and is likely to incapacitate me in the near future. I trust that my doctors will do everything they can to prevent further seizures and to keep me in comfort. I will not endure extraordinary excess pain and suffering, while hundreds of thousand of dollars will not be spent on surgical debulking, radiation, and chemotherapeutic regimens which do not work.

"Modern medicine cannot cure my cancer, but it can keep me comfortable and free of pain. I have already contacted the Massachusetts General Hospital Hospice program.”

If such a suggestion seems heartless, it nonetheless reflects a crucial debate that has started about end-of-life care, which accounts for a significant percentage of Medicare expenditures.

Pointing to a study that shows only 37 percent of oncologists discuss such issues with their advanced-stage patients, PBS' News Hour did a segment this week about a woman choosing to forego heroic measures against her terminal cancer in favor of maintaining the quality of her life as long as she can.

In the face of constantly improving treatments and the amounts of money needed to provide them, the morality of choices about ending life may eventually engage as much emotion as the debate over when life begins.

Cost-benefit analysis will be pitted against such poetry as Dylan Thomas' "Do not go gentle into that good night,/Old age should burn and rave at close of day./Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

Meanwhile, Ted Kennedy is showing us all how valuable a life can be in the face of all financial calculations.

Ted Kennedy's Crisis

As we near the fortieth anniversary of Robert Kennedy's assassination this week, Ted Kennedy will be fighting for his life today in six hours of "extremely risky" surgery for a brain tumor at Duke University Medical Center.

He has always been a survivor, outliving a plane crash, the plunge of a car into deep waters and the violent death of two brothers to fill out a long and honorable life.

Barack Obama said last week that he "would not be sitting here as a presidential candidate had it not been for some of the battles that Ted Kennedy has fought. He is somebody who battled for voting rights and civil rights when I was a child. I stand on his shoulders."

Others will be on their knees today, praying that Ted Kennedy will be granted more years to give us all.

The Can-Do Kennedy

Unlike his brothers, Ted Kennedy won't leave behind any soaring rhetoric for the history books, but colleagues in both parties this week are recalling his four decades as the Senate's most practical politician who "routinely reached across party lines on a wide number of issues to cut landmark deals."

In contrast to their public use of his name to signify woolly-headed liberalism, Republicans are talking about the "go-to guy" in getting laws on the books, practitioner of a lost bipartisan art in the era of Bush-Rove scorched-earth polarization.

“He’s a legislator’s legislator," says Sen. Jon Kyl. "At the end of the day, he wants to legislate, he understands how, and he understands compromise.”

“I’ve known and worked with him for 40 years," recalls GOP Conference Chairman Lamar Alexander. "He’s results-oriented. He takes his positions, but he sits down and gets results,” Alexander said.

Jack and Bobby Kennedy were tough acts to follow, and their younger brother turned out not to have their talent for words to inspire voters. In 1980, his attempt to challenge Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination was undone when he fumbled the answer to Roger Mudd's question of why he wanted to be president in a TV interview.

Instead, Ted Kennedy fell back on the old-pol genes of his maternal grandfather, Honey Fitz Fitzgerald, who helped build modern Boston during four decades as mayor after his family came over from Ireland during the Potato Famine.

Now, Republicans like John McCain' sidekick Lindsey Graham are being wistful about cutting deals with Ted Kennedy with a handshake or promise when they hammered out laws such as one on policy toward foreign detainees.

“When we worked on the detainee bill it was just members of the Senate and members of the executive branch literally writing a bill, line by line,” Graham remembers. “He told me it was like the Civil Rights Bill, where you just put people in a room and you wouldn’t let them out.”

When a new American era starts next January, both Democrats and Republicans are hoping Ted Kennedy will still be there to show them how it's done.

The Last of Our Kennedy Past

For my generation, the sadness over Ted Kennedy's diagnosis today goes deeper than the sudden awareness of one man's mortality. He is our last link to a time of youth and hope.

The youngest of Joe and Rose's nine children, he grew up in the shadow of not only Jack and Bobby, but the oldest brother Joe, who died in World War II. When JFK was elected president, Teddy had to wait two years before he turned thirty and could run for and win his brother's vacated Senate seat.

Over the next 44 years, he won eight more elections, survived both the accident at Chappaquiddick and the ensuing scandal, made a half-hearted attempt to run for the White House in 1980 and then worked hard and tirelessly to become a figure worthy of the Kennedy legend.

The shock and grief on the faces of his Congressional colleagues today testify to his accomplishments both as a keeper of the Kennedy flame and a figure of accomplishment in his own right.

As we prepare to turn a new page in our political history, Ted Kennedy is a living reminder of some of the best that preceded it. Millions will be praying for him.

The LBJing of Hillary Clinton

Now that the question is coming front and center, Barack Obama may want to turn to his backer Ted Sorensen for advice about putting Hillary Clinton on the ticket with him, as John F. Kennedy did with his chief rival for the nomination, Lyndon Johnson.

Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, reports today that she "is probably going to fight to be the vice presidential nominee on an Obama-for-president ticket."

After a bitter campaign, it won't be easy. Obama supporters, notably his wife Michelle, are reportedly opposed, but as Sorensen notes in his new memoirs, so was JFK's brother Robert. Yet Kennedy offered Johnson a place on the ticket, mostly to help win Texas and other Southern states in what would turn out to be a close election.

Moreover, Sorensen could also enlighten Obama about the virtues of converting a former enemy into an ally or at least neutralizing possible opposition. If Johnson remained as Senate Majority Leader, JFK told him in 1960, he "would be just impossible...Lyndon would screw me all the time."

Unpalatable as the idea may be to Obama's most fervent supporters--ironically, even Ted Kennedy has publicly opposed it--this could be another time when the Democratic Party needs unity more than a balanced ticket.

True believers in both camps will offer fervent arguments about why it wouldn't work but, in a year when so much is at stake, neatness may not count.