http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/08/28/the_eterna_prince_98070.htmlTed Kennedy: An Eternal Prince
By Eugene Robinson
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I was in Madison Square Garden -- a wide-eyed young reporter, getting his first taste of national politics -- when Kennedy gave his electrifying concession speech at the 1980 Democratic convention. The famous final passage, which brought down the house, was as powerful and succinct a manifesto as any public figure in this country has ever delivered:
"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."
Those are stirring words, and Kennedy spent the next three decades backing them up. In the powerful cadences of that sentence, he makes specific commitments. He promised to work -- which he did, indefatigably, shoving and tugging legislation through the procedural molasses of the Senate. He promised not to abandon the cause -- the liberal agenda of equal opportunity and equal justice. He promised to keep hope alive -- and never, even in his final months, did he betray a hint of hopelessness. And he promised that the dream would live on -- a vision of an America that lives up to its highest ideals, an America in which those who are least fortunate or most in need are not forgotten.
By then, Ted Kennedy had already had monumental impact on his country -- his work in reforming the nation's immigration laws in 1965 literally altered the face of the nation by changing a quota system that had made it easy for Europeans to come to this country while admitting only a trickle of immigrants from parts of the world where the people happened to be black or brown.
The cause of his life, however, became health care -- changing the unacknowledged system of rationing under which we apportion care according to an individual's ability to pay. There are those who believe that if Kennedy had not been ailing, President Obama's attempt at health care reform might be further along. I doubt that, given the Republican Party's strategy of intransigence and fear-mongering.
But we sorely miss Kennedy's moral clarity. He believed our nation has the responsibility to ensure that every American has the right to affordable health care. Perhaps his life as an eternal prince taught him that happiness and salvation lie in sacrificing self-interest for the greater good.
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