In a telling post today one of America’s foremost conservative commentators, Michelle Malkin, has a two-thought article leading her site. Essentially it says Ted Kennedy is dead, please wait until the body is cold before kicking the almighty crap out of him.
As someone who has always been more interested in watching the bile spilling from dogmatic ideologues than actually agreeing with anything they have to say, I find this fair enough. Kennedy haters are champing at the bit. The last of the Commie-loving, big-spending brothers is dead.
But watch out. I’m about to use an –ism. It must be a red letter day.
There’s a photo of Jack and Bobby in my study, taken in 1960 by Hank Walker. They’re talking – probably about the Red Sox or football, but you like to think it’s about how to handle Communists and avert nuclear war.
To me this is a photo about family, hard work, and political idealism – the three things, I think, that most people associate with the Kennedy name.
Family and hard work are not in short supply, but that political idealism that rises above politics is. Sure, Ted’s not in the photo. But until yesterday there was a bit of that Kennedy spirit alive.
The name is about Big Ideas. The guys from NASA still talk about the mission Jack Kennedy set for them. It’s less conjecture and more fact that Kennedy helped steel American resolve to complete one of the hardest things people have ever done – putting a man on the moon, and returning him safely to Earth.
Ted Kennedy’s Big Idea was healthcare reform, which has convulsed American politics in the past month. He phoned in to the conversation in Washington from his deathbed.
Malkin might have asked her readers to give the guy’s body time to go cold, but it looks like the Democratic Party is leading the conga line out of the morgue. In the time I’ve been writing this, the lead on the Drudge Report has changed. (The story’s here.)
I guess we can leave them to it. But if you have parents who were teenagers or older in the 1960s, today is a good day to ask them about what the Kennedys meant to them.
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