Make the Eulogy a Declaration of War

The wingnuts are hysterically screaming orders to Democrats not to "politicize" Senator Kennedy's death. Why? Because they are justifiably terrified of the power inherent in a eulogy to the nation's Greatest Modern Liberal.

And who but the nation's greatest living orator to give a rafter-shaking, foundation-cracking, send-'em-into-the-streets Liberal Call To Arms?

John Nichols of The Nation makes the case for the only kind of eulogy that would truly honor Senator Edward M. Kennedy.

The only question is whether Obama will honor the moment and use it, as Kennedy once did, to speak not merely of a life lost but of a cause unbowed.

To do right by Kennedy, Obama must make his words on Saturday more than a eulogy.

He must deliver a renewing address, both for the causes Kennedy championed -- of which the first and foremost is universal health care -- and for the presidency in which the late senator invested as much hope as the most idealistic Obama volunteer.

Obama must speak in the Kennedy tradition when he rises to speak Saturday morning at Boston's Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help.

SNIP

My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.

Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world.

As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him: 'Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.'

With those words, Ted Kennedy grabbed the flag of American liberalism and raised it aloft -- reshaping the anguished cry at his brother's assassination into an inspired call to action.

Obama faces a different task than the one Kennedy performed on June 8, 1968, at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York. He is eulogizing a friend, not a brother. He is speaking of a man who died in relative old age, not the youthful victim of an assassination.

And, yet, the stakes are just as high.

Few would seriously debate that Barack Obama has been too cautious, too unfocused in the first months of the presidency that Ted Kennedy imagined would be characterized by: "New hope for justice and fair prosperity for the many, and not just for the few. New hope -- and this is the cause of my life -- new hope that we will break the old gridlock and guarantee that every American -- north, south, east, west, young, old -- will have decent, quality healthcare as a fundamental right and not a privilege."

Obama has an opportunity to honor Kennedy by turning this moment of loss into a moment of renewal.

This is not just what Kennedy would have requested.

It is what the liberal lion would have demanded.

Read the whole thing.