Remembering Kennedy
Of the group, despite their dramatic differences in personal background (and out-of-Senate personal behavior), Kennedy’s career most closely imitated that of Norris. Both were long-serving (30 years in the Senate for Norris, 46-plus for Kennedy). Both involved themselves in a wide range of issues, were respected by ideological foes, and were remarkably successful in passing legislation (Kennedy more so than Norris on the latter issue). Both successfully transitioned historical eras—Norris was virtually the only Senate progressive to remain influential among New Deal liberals, Kennedy’s endorsement of Barack Obama proved how significant he remained even after 1960s liberalism had largely passed from the scene.
In the analyses of Kennedy’s career that I’ve read, two matters have received insufficient attention in understanding why he ranks so highly among the Senate elite. The first is an acknowledgment of the sheer breadth of public policy issues in which he was a major player, and how his range of interests in the Senate changed over time. For those who have followed politics closely only in the last decade, Kennedy would probably be most associated with health care, education, and perhaps immigration. But in the 1970s, he was a key figure on foreign policy issues—to take but one example, hearings from Kennedy’s Refugees Subcommittee provided some of the first congressional exposure of Augusto Pinochet’s human rights abuses in Chile, and Kennedy sponsored the amendments that cut off U.S. aid to Pinochet. In the 1980s, Kennedy was a significant force, with Gary Hart and Carl Levin, in supporting military reform from his position on the Armed Services Committee. Though few observers seem to recall that Kennedy was even on the committee, those who served with him didn’t forget him, as this interesting statement from now-NSC advisor Jim Jones revealed. And although Kennedy wasn’t a major player on legal and judicial issues (except immigration) for most of the last decade, in the 1970s and 1980s he was one of the two or three most important senators on such matters. In fact, with the exception of technical finance and budget issues, there probably wasn’t a key Senate question in which Kennedy didn’t play an important role at some point in his career.
Second, Kennedy has few important votes that haven’t stood the test of time, at least from the standpoint of his basic ideology. To take two high-profile examples in which Kennedy departed from most of his fellow Senate Democrats at the time, but where his position is now the majority view in the party: I suspect that Senators Cantwell, Dodd, Kerry, and Rockefeller (among others) would like to redo their votes on the Iraq war resolution, just as I suspect that Senators Bradley, Harkin, Jeffords, Mikulski, and Murray wished they had voted the other way on DOMA.
A generation from now, if Politico were to similarly survey historians of Congress,* I doubt we would see any names added to the list of Senate greats. A perceptive article from Ron Brownstein helps explains why: as we have moved toward a “quasi-parliamentary” system, even in the Senate, personal attributes of the individual senators matter less and less and their party identification matters more and more. If the job of a senator is largely to vote the party line, then legislative, personal, or intellectual skills matter little.
One point deserved more emphasis from Brownstein: this hyper-partisan culture also has come to affect how politicians explain government policy, and their own motivations, to the public. We live in a culture of political duplicity, in which leading members of both parties offer disingenuous or outright false explanations about key issues. Suggesting that people had a legitimate fear that the government might pull the plug on grandma (as Charles Grassley did) or telling a Sunday morning show that perhaps Sarah Palin had a point with her “death panels” remark (as John McCain did) helps advance the party line in this new, quasi-parliamentary system. But these types of statements—made with increasing frequency, by members on both sides of the aisle (in recent months, the Republicans far more ferociously)—will hardly do anything for the historical reputation of the senator who makes them.
In that respect, I think that Brownstein is correct in suggesting that Kennedy will be the last of a generation, and also that the change in American political culture isn't a positive one.
(*--Actually, given present personnel patterns in the academy, a generation from now I doubt there will even be a sufficient number of historians of Congress to survey, so perhaps I should say “journalists who specialize in Congress” instead.)