Ted Kennedy was my senator for sixteen years, from 1984-2000, which means that I caught him in the mid-late years of his career. In Massachusetts, he was always there, a florid monument, and yet, unlike other legislators who become landmarks, he never stopped working. Senators who serve more than three or four decades usually cease being productive well before the halfway mark, and by the end are simply holding the chair until they expire and their state can turn to someone else a few generations younger. Not Kennedy: those years when I lived in Massachusetts were his most productive (think of Americans with Disabilities, Family and Medical Leave, Children’s Health Insurance Program). He didn’t pursue the role of statesman; foreign policy seems not to have interested him much, beyond his opposition to the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. But if you measure a senator’s effectiveness by his impact on the daily lives of vast numbers of Americans, it’s impossible to think of anyone else in our lifetimes who comes close to Kennedy.
It's always interesting to observe when politicians morph from humans into abstractions, particularly (though not only) in the hands of their political opponents. You see this with Ronald Reagan, who remains to this day the focus of both uncritical worship and fact-averse loathing. Well into this decade you saw this (among liberal activist groups) with Pat Buchanan and Jerry Falwell; it remains to be seen who among the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld triumvurate will endure as the totemic hate-figures, though my money's on the Dick. Ted Kennedy was like no other Democrat in this regard. Who's gonna replace him, Barney Frank? Bill Clinton has long since wriggled off the hook.
A man of privilege, he was a staunch supporter of the downtrodden, including the LGBT community when there were precious few allies in Congress. He was an early proponent of funding for HIV/AIDS research and care in the 1980s, battling conservative religious hostility and White House indifference to the emerging epidemic. In the early 1990’s he became an early supporter of gay rights legislation and voted to strip “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” from the National Defense Authorization Act in 1993. He stood up as one of only fourteen Senators to vote against the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996.]]>