Before I begin this diary I want to make it clear I only hope for the best for the Senior Senator from Massachusetts and a full and hearty recovery to continue his work for liberal and progressive causes. Having said that I would also like to point out this diary is being pounded out on a keyboard that sits underneath two large and prominent framed photos of Robert F. Kennedy and John F. Kennedy. I’ve always called myself a Truman-RFK Democrat who feels the ideals they represented helped define my political being.
With the news of Ted Kennedy’s hospitalization this morning I felt saddened there may be a possibility we would lose him. Though my feelings for his well-being are genuine I also must say he is not a favorite of mine. I consider him mercurial at best and someone who’s crassness and often times sneering arrogance comes at the expense of the liberal and progressive causes he claims to represent.
That why today I felt compelled to write a diary and put Ted Kennedy in some kind of context and/or perspective for those too young to know or remember.
For me it all came to a head in a moment I’ll never forget that even now makes me cringe with anger. In 1980, when he challenged President Carter for the nomination, he pulled one of the rankest and crass moves I’ve ever seen a politician pull. The younger activists today following the current election and drama between their respective choices of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton can find themselves at bitter cross purposes with each other and some even claiming hatred for the other. They see this election playing out as bitter and damaging to the party. In actuality they haven’t a clue.
The fight between Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy for the 1980 Democratic Party nomination for President was one of the bitterest, if not THE bitterest, nomination fights in my memory. It makes the one being played out now look like a spat between two friends whose acrimony evaporates on their next meeting.
In a bitter and recriminating nomination contest that would eventually metastasize into a very un Carteresque explosion of bravado, the President would snarl right before the Iowa caucuses, "I’ll whip his ass." Carter would in fact dust off his rival before the convention in delegates but Kennedy also proclaimed he would take his fight to the convention and make a play for the Carter delegates. Does this sound familiar? As a political junkie already in full flower I knew better than anyone, including my friends and fellow activists that Carter was done in the general election even before his convention nomination acceptance speech. Sitting Presidents getting serious challenges within their own party for the nomination lose in the general. Period. The precedent goes all the way back to Franklin Pierce. More recently you can find examples in George H.W. Bush in 1992, Gerald Ford in 1976 and Lyndon Johnson in 1968.
The moment that still makes me enraged whenever I am reminded of it is the scene of President Carter on the podium with his wife Roselyn moments after he finished his nomination speech. There they were waiting for Ted Kennedy to emerge on the podium so that in a sign of unity and strength they would shake hands and appear side by side to show not only the convention, but the then vast television audience how bygones were bygones and they would unite to defeat the common enemy, Ronald Reagan. Instead what the world witnessed was a stubborn and bitter defeated rival whose arrogance would not permit him to be anything else but a crass boor as he refused to shake hand with Carter as he appeared. For a painful four or five minutes Democrats were subjected to a nauseating validation of what Kennedy was as Carter literally chased, and I mean chased, Kennedy around the podium to no avail as Kennedy grinned, waved and kept moving with his back to Carter as he desperately tried to get Kennedy to shake his hand and stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity. It was all I could do to refrain from kicking my tv set in. As I sat and seethed with anger and finally despair I finally accepted the fact the world would be subjected to an empty headed buffoon who would treat the Presidency as an episode of Marcus Welby, M.D. whose idea of solutions to our problems would be bromides and vacant smiles about how great America was. Later I sat on my couch and literally cried. It was a horrible election season and even now as I type this it still reverberates in my being. Yes, I know all about the perfect storm of events and actions that met President Carter at the moment that included the Iranian crisis, energy crisis and inflationary pressures on the economy. But sitting Presidents are still difficult to beat. President Carter probably was destined to lose anyway, but it was made a certainty by Kennedy and his hubris about who he was, who his brothers were and the legacy he represented that would harden a nation against thinking about President Carter for a second term.
Here is a video that covers Kennedy at the 1980 convention that does not show that horrible moment at the end but it eludes to the instance in question and how the networks played it up. The second video is about Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick affair and how he mishandled it as an issue during the campaign. I never thought badly of him when he emerged from the affair but I always felt politically it was too damaging for him to overcome in a national contest.
Over the years I’ve appreciated his work and tireless perseverance for the liberal causes that are near and dear to my heart. But that doesn’t and it never will make it right in my eyes for what he did in 1980. I do hope he has a full recovery to continue his work and support for Barack Obama. The bitterness of the pill he served me in 1980 might taste a little less bitter with an Obama victory.
TrumanDem
Truman's Conscience