Reminding Democrats Why They Are Democrats

You may have heard about the devastating debate attacks leveled on Mitt Romney during the first night of the Democratic Convention - in a video tribute to Senator Edward M. Kennedy. 

But that video was much more than just the source of hilarity at RMoney's expense. That video was the inspirational reminder to every Democratic voter in the nation of Who. We. Are. and What. We. Stand. For.

John Nichols at The Nation:

“I love this—seeing that debate again,” said Massachusetts Congressman Jim McGovern, a progressive Democrat and frequent ally of Kennedy in foreign-policy fights with the Bush administration. “You know why Ted Kennedy won that debate? You know why he beat Mitt Romney? Because Ted Kennedy was a real Democrat. He didn’t have to worry about getting the talking points right; he didn’t have to check the polls. He spoke from the heart, spoke for his principles. And people loved it. There’s a lesson there for Democrats this year.”

McGovern hit on something important there. The Kennedy moment at the 2012 convention was not just about recalling a fight with Mitt Romney. It was about renewing a progressive program that is too often tempered and softened by Democrats who do not get it.

It was about being against someone, it was and must be about being for something.

So it was that, when the delegates were done laughing at Romney, the senator took the delegates back to where they came from.

There on the screen was the last of the Kennedy brothers explaining once more the point of debates and campaigns and election victories: to advance not just a candidate, not just a party but a set of ideals: healthcare for all; social justice for people of color, for women, for lesbians and gays and immigrants; economic justice for workers and peace.

“When I stopped crying, I remembered how much we miss him,” said Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy.

“There is a void,” said Congressman McGovern. “Ted Kennedy was the conscience of the party. But he was also the master strategist. He knew that we could win by standing on principle. In fact, that’s the way we win best, and biggest.”

On the other side of the hall, a few minutes later, Ted Kennedy Jr. smiled. “My father comes back every four years to remind Democrats why they are Democrats. He did it one more time.”

Teddy and Harry

Health care reform is, of course, a strong first step in achieving the lifelong goal of late Senator Theodore M. Kennedy.

But Teddy was just taking the hand-off from the original advocate for Universal Health Care: President Harry S Truman.

As Missouri's own Blue Girl explains:

Harry S Truman died in 1972, so he will not be there today when the President signs the landmark legislation that passed the House on Sunday, but I hope that Harry gets his props at the signing ceremony.

That is because Harry Truman was the first President to propose universal coverage for all Americans and he did so nearly 65 years ago, in November 1945, arguing in a message to Congress that the federal government had a vested interest in the health of the citizenry, especially America's children."The health of American children, like their education, should be recognized as a definite public responsibility," Truman said.

Truman's plan went so far as to call for a national health insurance policy that Americans could buy into with a monthly premium and in exchange, have their care covered.

For this, Truman was pilloried and vilified. The AMA denounced his plan as "socialized medicine" and accused the President and his White House of toeing "the Moscow party line" - a highly inflammatory charge at the dawn of the cold war.

Truman's plan put universal coverage for Americans into the Democratic platform, and it has remained ever since, yet it was so despised by the medical establishment that it would be nearly twenty years before significant healthcare legislation would be proposed and passed.

Read the whole thing - it's wonderful.

Kennedy's Bipartisanship: He Never Lost the Prize

In Salon, Joe Conason refutes the latest repug lies that Ted Kennedy would have bargained away the public option in order to get a worthless health care bill.

Kennedy, Conason shows, knew how to attract allies without giving away the prize.

The sheer scope of Kennedy's work is simply staggering. The beneficiaries of his achievement numbered in the many millions. They were poor, elderly, women, gays, minorities, immigrants, veterans, students, workers, the disabled, the mentally ill and, perhaps above all, children. To catalog the landmark bills that he sponsored and managed into law is a challenge; to enumerate his entire achievement may be virtually impossible.

Drawing up lists of bills and amendments is inevitably a dry exercise, but it is Kennedy's spirit of compassion that lives in every human being touched by those laws. The homage we owe him is to honor his bedrock belief that government must lift up the oppressed and defend the defenseless.

SNIP

It is true that Kennedy, the friendly warrior, excelled in bipartisanship. Nearly all of the domestic reforms mentioned here were sponsored by at least one Republican senator. But in every case, those stodgy conservatives were cajoled and whispered (and perhaps shamed) into venturing much closer to Kennedy's perspective. He drew them toward him, invariably against their own habits, not by selling out his progressive goal, but by appealing to the decency he perceived in them.

Forty years ago he began the quest for universal healthcare that became the cause of his life when he introduced his first bill outlining that goal. His final bequest to the Senate is the Affordable Health Choices Act, his version of the Obama administration's reform proposals, which was passed by the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee last month. Republicans now say that if Kennedy had
not been forced by illness to relinquish the chairmanship of that committee, he would have negotiated away the strongest provisions of that bill to win passage.

Kennedy's Republican friends should not make that disingenuous argument in his lamented absence. Lest there be any doubt about what he truly wanted, his bill includes a robust public option along with all the insurance reforms and cost controls that the president has endorsed since this process began.

How would he have handled the intransigence and dishonesty of the Republican opposition? We know that he could shout as well as whisper — and that he could be partisan as well as bipartisan. He believed that the time for incremental changes had passed. He was ready to fight. The tragedy of his death is not only that he didn't see the triumph he had dreamed, but that he fell before he could lead the nation to that final victory. Now that victory will have to be won in his name.

Read the whole thing.

Then tell them to fight:

Here's a quick way to get to the contact information for your elected officials. (Scroll down to box on the right labelled "My Elected Officials" and enter your zip code.)

Alternatively, Max at Firedoglake explains how to put recalcitrant congress critters up against the wall - the Facebook wall.

Politicize My Death

The wonderful Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon demolishes the faux pearl-clutchers in the Grand Old Poopyheads:

I’m almost 32 and I’m in good health, so this might seem a little premature. But as the President pointed out that even young, healthy people should have living wills, the occasion of Ted Kennedy’s death---and Paul Wellstone’s before it---makes it clear that anyone who is a liberal in the public eye at all should explicitly spell out their wishes about the “politicization” of their deaths, or else the wingnuts will declare that the only proper way to honor your legacy is to start by undermining it. So, in the event of my passing, I want it to be clear these are my wishes:

1) Please honor me by continuing to fight for the liberal causes I held dear.
2) Explicitly state in any obituaries, memorial services, etc. that what I would have wanted was to keep the fight going.
3) Impassioned speeches about the fight ahead for progressivism are especially welcome.
4) Indeed, the only way to honor my memory is to double down and fight for a better world.
5) Conservatives who don’t like this should shut the fuck up.

Obviously, I’m a mere blogger, so this is mostly irrelevant. But I’d like to get this out there in hopes of inspiring others. Hopefully, those who are truly influential to the point where wingnuts will try to use their death to undermine their legacy would be well-advised to spell out their wishes, so their survivors have a trump card.

Pass it on.

The Measure of a Liberal Man

President Obama is going to have to stretch quite a bit to make his Saturday eulogy beat this:

Finally, we must take a measure of the man. Not the person, or the legislator, or the family member. No, the man. Ted Kennedy was more of a man's man than any of the brush-clearing, hick-talking, pick-up driving politicians who overcompensate again and again by faking it. No, Kennedy demonstrated, through all the ups and downs, again and again what a real man is. It is a type of masculinity that we rarely see anymore because it is a fearlessness that few are allowed to embrace.

SNIP

A man works to help those who need help. A real man is a liberal because a real man is unafraid of change and progress and difference.

Read the whole brilliant thing.

I'm Proud to be a Liberal

By David Horsey, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

h/t They Gave Us A Republic commenter paulfromportland.

Order reprints here.

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.

The Cub's First Roar

For everyone younger than me, who has never heard a modern politician make a full-throated liberal call to arms, a gift from David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo:

The brief post I did yesterday on Ted Kennedy's April 7, 1968 speech
to the Alaska state Democratic convention didn't really do it justice. It's a grainy black-and-white film but the audio of Kennedy's lilting Boston accent is clear, and the speech Kennedy delivers, which I was not familiar with until yesterday, stands even 40 years later as a close-to-perfect expression of modern American liberalism.

To set the scene, Martin Luther King had been assassinated on April 4, a Thursday. Sen. Robert Kennedy, then campaigning for the Presidency was supposed to address the convention on that following Sunday in Sitka, but sent his brother instead so he could monitor violence in the wake of King's murder. Robert's own murder would come just two months later.

So the speech comes at a momentous time. Yet even in the heat of that moment, the speech transcends the shock of recent events. I assume it was written for Robert to deliver, but Ted delivers it was a seriousness and forcefulness that belies his age at the time: 36.

Maybe I'm falling into the trap of inflating the significance of the deceased's life, but the speech is so well-written and powerfully delivered that it deserves consideration among the great American political speeches. Fast-forward to the 5:20 mark, where Kennedy uses the King assassination to launch into his passionate assertion and defense of liberalism.

I can't be at Arlington Saturday, so these are my tribute. Enjoy or ignore, but until Sunday I'm holding vigil.

"Fighting for Progress Without Shame or Obfuscation"

Another wonderful tribute, with lessons for Democrats, this one from Digby:

The Kennedys always pissed off the wingnuts to an absurd degree, and yet they never complained about it, even though they paid such a huge price for their public service. It's one of the things I like the most about them.

SNIP

But once it became clear, he didn't just turn his seat into a sinecure or retreat into cynicism, he carried on valiantly, becoming one of the few master legislators in American history, insisting on making progress by hook or crook even during the long era of conservative rule in which he served. And he took the slings and arrows from his enemies along the way with humor, dignity and class.

John McCain said the other day that Kennedy's great gift was in making concessions to Republicans. That may be correct, but not in the way McCain meant it to be. Kennedy's great gift was fighting for progress without shame or obfuscation, making the moral argument for liberalism, and always trying to move the ball forward, inch by inch if that's all he could get and in great leaps if the opportunity presented itself. If he made the right concessions, it sure as hell wasn't in service of McCain's pinched and cruel agenda.

He was everything the conservatives hate: a proud, fighting liberal who didn't shirk from the label. Each day his presence was a rebuke to everything they believed in. So when you hear the inevitable lugubrious paeans from the right over the next few days, keep in mind that their movement and its people spent the last 40 years treating Ted Kennedy the way they treat Barack Obama today -- with utter, single-minded contempt.

And all the while, Kennedy just kept going, getting more concessions from Republicans by being true to his principles than mealy mouthed centrism ever did. There's a lesson in that.

Read the whole thing.

What Kennedy Really Did

The Rude Pundit puts Senator Kennedy's accomplishments in plain language even conservatives can support:

Do you like your state and not the federal government controlling the curriculum of your kids' schools? Thank Ted Kennedy.

Do you like being able to vote starting at age 18? Thank Ted Kennedy.

Do you think low-income people should get help with heating their homes in the winter? Thank the man.

Do you think the federal government should fund cancer research? Yep.

Do you believe that Meals on Wheels is a good thing? Ditto.

Does your daughter (or you, if you're female) like playing soccer or basketball or softball at school? That'd be because of Ted Kennedy.

Do you think that disabled people should be able to go to school? Have access to buildings? Not be discriminated against for housing and loads of other things? Kennedy, big time.

You like your cheap airfares? You know the answer.

You think people on welfare oughta get jobs? So did Kennedy.

And on and on and on. Read the whole thing.

Advice for Jack Conway

From a 2002 profile of the greatest Senator in American history: (emphasis added)

The 1995 speech came in the context of Newt Gingrich being sworn in as Speaker in the wake of the GOP's gain of fifty-three House seats in November 1994--the same day that Mario Cuomo was defeated in the New York gubernatorial race and Tom Foley was trounced in the Washington State House race.

In this sail-against-the-wind speech, given at the National Press Club, Kennedy rejected the conventional wisdom that the 1994 elections proved the country was veering sharply to the right. He argued that the reason the Democrats lost so many elections was that they had compromised too much and shed their distinct identity. Kennedy famously declared:

"If the Democrats run for cover, if we become pale carbon copies of the opposition, we will lose--and deserve to lose. The last thing this country needs is two Republican parties."

Before Kennedy made this argument in public, he delivered it in private to President Clinton, who was in a deep funk over the 1994 election and being urged by pollster Dick Morris to compromise even more and embrace portions of the Gingrich-Dole agenda.

Kennedy told Clinton to fight for incremental national healthcare, jobs and an increase in the minimum wage, and to resist making any cuts in education. He gave Clinton a memo that summed up his thinking on what a Democratic Party in power should stand for. The memo said:

"Democrats are for higher wages and new job opportunities. Republicans are for cuts to pay for tax breaks for the rich."

Kennedy's October 2001 speech on the Senate floor, opposing Bush's stingy, elitist economic stimulus package, is another road map for lost Democrats. In it, Kennedy asserted that any effective economic stimulus should "target the dollars to low- and moderate-income families, who are most certain to spend it rather than save it."

The key to Kennedy's politics is his belief that Democrats must simultaneously advocate for the poor and the middle class at the expense of the wealthy and corporate America.

As someone whose policies and politics are so well integrated, Kennedy knows that liberals win elections when the poor and the middle class vote together. And liberals lose when the suburban, independent middle-class votes with the upper classes.

Time to show what you're made of, Jack. Whose side are you on?

The Superb Senate Health Care Reform Bill We Already Have

Don't let anyone get away with sniffling "if only Kennedy were still in the Senate, we'd have a real health care reform bill."

We have a Senate health care reform bill, it has a strong public option, and it's the one produced by Senator Edward M. Kennedy's own committee, the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

All I keep hearing is politicians wishing that Ted Kennedy was able to be involved in the health care reform process. Republicans are actually saying that -- guys like John McCain.

Well then, he should honor Kennedy's legacy and negotiate in good faith, but that will never happen:

Speaking to George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, John McCain argued that the real hindrance to health-care reform is the absence of Sen. Ted Kennedy. "It's huge that he's absent," McCain said, "not only because of my personal affection for him, but because I think the health-care reform might be in a very different place today."

This stuff just isn't plausible. Kennedy was around in 1994 and there was no deal. More to the point, Kennedy's committee, the HELP Committee, has passed health-care reform. Kennedy's staff, as you might expect, led their effort. But neither Kennedy nor his staff can make the deals for another committee. If Kennedy were in the Senate now, health care would be exactly where it is: Through Ted Kennedy's Committee and stuck in the morass of Max Baucus's Gang of Six.

Meanwhile, if John McCain wants to honor Ted Kennedy, he shouldn't just talk the guy up. He should play a constructive role in passing the legislation that Kennedy considered the cause of his life. McCain says that Kennedy "had a unique way of sitting down with the parties at a table and making the right concessions," but surely McCain can decide what concessions those should be and present them to Max Baucus — or the New York Times — in exchange for his vote.

McCain and the Republicans would be playing the same games with or without Ted having an active role right now, but his power would be in dealing with the American people. He'd be pounding the talk shows, town halls and radio airwaves with solid reasoning behind his health care reforms. And President Obama needs good surrogates to go out there and explain to Americans why we need health care reform.

I think we all miss Ted and wish he were knocking heads in Congress and in the media, but Chris Dodd has taken over his committee and they released a bill that was crafted by Kennedy's staff which I assume is one that he's in favor of. So we have four bills done and a fifth one that's in limbo but should be done soon. Why is it that the only bill that matters to the Villagers is the Baucus/Senate Finance Committee bill? Why is that the Holy Grail? Would some talking head at least explain to America what is contained in the HELP bill? Is that too frakkon' much to ask?

So keep up the pressure:

Here's a quick way to get to the contact information for your elected officials. (Scroll down to box on the right labelled "My Elected Officials" and enter your zip code.)

Alternatively, Max at Firedoglake explains how to put recalcitrant congress critters up against the wall - the Facebook wall.

Kennedy's Legacy: Support the Public Option

What we've lost.

59-40.

Only reconciliation can save the public option now.

Reconciliation and us.

Subject: Sign On to the Public Option Resolution

Dear Friend,

Can you call on your local Democratic Party and other local groups to adopt the Public Option Resolution demanding inclusion of a strong public health insurance option in any health care bill passed this year?

A whopping 76% of voters want health insurance reform to include the choice of a Public Option. In the words of President Obama, the choice of a Public Option will, "keep the insurance companies honest."

So the insurance companies and right wing are fighting tooth and nail to get Democrats to cave on the public option and vote for fake reform like a "trigger" or co-opts. We can't let Democrats capitulate, we need to support Democrats only passing a bill with a strong public option.

Public Option Resolution.

That is why bloggers like FireDogLake have joined forces with CREDO Action and Democracy for America to pass Public Option Resolutions at local political groups across the country.

Please join us and forward this email to your friends, chances are they are part of the 76% of Americans who want Democrats to be resolved for a Public Option.

Public Option Resolution.

Please Not Yet

Last summer, I wanted Ted Kennedy to survive brain cancer long enough to see Barack Obama elected President.

By Christmas, I wanted Ted Kennedy to survive long enough to see Barack Obama inaugurated President.

Now, I won't be grateful for those unless Ted Kennedy survives to witness President Barack Obama sign into law the legislation for which Senator Kennedy has fought his entire political life.

bmaz has a while-he-still-lives tribute to the Lion of the Senate that I doubt any future obit will match.

The question has gone unasked out of respect, or murmured only quietly in back rooms: What about Teddy's health? Nobody wanted to be the one to say it in public. Nobody had to; once again Ted Kennedy is ahead of us. In a posting late Wednesday at the Boston Globe, comes news that Senator Edward M. Kennedy has authored a letter to Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and the Massachusetts Congressional leaders requesting that provisions be made for his successor.

Literally generations of politically active American citizens have been motivated to study and participate in the political process by the men--and women--of the Kennedy family (I am one). Since the tragedies of the 60s however, the Old Lion of the family, and, indeed, the US Senate (and Democratic politics as a whole), has been Edward M. Kennedy. The sturm and drang of the current health care fight? That has been his battle cry for decades. Barack Obama? Likely still a Senator if Ted Kennedy had endorsed Hillary Clinton instead. Name an important piece of social legislation passed in the last four plus decades and his fingerprints are on it.

So the question of "what if" about his health is an unpleasant, emotional and difficult one. But recent events have made the question undeniably germane. Senator Kennedy wasn't present for the Judiciary Committee consideration of Sonia Sotomayor's Supreme Court nomination; you knew he wanted to be there, but his absence was understandable. When he also was absent from the Senate floor for the historic confirmation vote for Sotomayor, the first Hispanic American elevated to the Court, you had a feeling he was seriously ill. A week later, when he could not attend the presentation when he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, by Barack Obama, a man he likens to his brother John, you knew it was bad. And then he was absent from the funeral for his sister Eunice. Ted Kennedy always gave the eulogies for Kennedy family members; he always had to, and he was always there. Always. Until now.

From The Globe:

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, in a poignant acknowledgment of his mortality at a critical time in the national health care debate, has privately asked the governor and legislative leaders to change the succession law to guarantee that Massachusetts will not lack a Senate vote when his seat becomes vacant.

Ted Kennedy is still a lion representing the interests of Massachusetts and the country, and still doing so selflessly and honorably by laying contingency plans for his own succession and drawing the sting from everybody else in addressing the subject head on. When the wind comes for the Lion he wants to insure we are ready. And that there is a vote for healthcare.

Read the whole thing.

Bless You, Teddy

And Fuck You, all you DINOs and DLCers and Blue Dogs who think you're real Democrats.

THIS is a Real Democrat.



Cross-posted at Watching Those We Chose.