Unfortunately I've been too busy trying to get this project that ate my life out the door in two weeks to watch the nonstop coverage of the Kennedy funeral. In a way it's been a relief to have an excuse not to, what with all the blathering by people like Peggy Noonan about how Ted Kennedy would have given up the public option because he was about bipartisanship (funny how conservatives have already appropriated Kennedy's corpse, as if to hijack it from Arlington). But I did want to watch the eulogies, and while the same blatherers were once again making noises about how this had to be the best speech of Barack Obama's career, the President fell a bit flat (not surprisingly, given his annoying tendency to internalize even the dumbest messages from right-leaning television talking heads). Instead, the eulogy that reduced me to a sobbing heap on the sofa, with those hiccuppy sobs that one ordinarily doesn't have simply by crying at funerals unless one is very close to the departed, was that of Ted Kennedy, Jr.

At first I almost thought it was James Spader giving the eulogy, so much did Ted Jr. resemble the randy lawyer from Boston Legal. After he started speaking with a vocal quality similar to the freshman Senator from the state of Minnesota, he even started to LOOK like Al Franken in a blond wig. But I've rarely heard a eulogy like this that so perfectly brought us into just what it was about this man that made people love him so, despite his flaws:

Poor Patrick. The one Kennedy who is an active legislator, a grief etched across his face (4:50 into the first video) that seems deeper and more profound than the normal grief and loss that comes with the loss of a parent, especially when that parent is such a larger-than-life figure; the one with the Kennedy substance abuse problems. -- it was he who had to follow his more glamorous and more articulate older brother in saying goodbye to their father. I would say this to Patrick J. Kennedy: Look at your father's life. Look at the ghastly mistakes he too made in his life. And look at how he turned it all around. You too can do this. You too can become a great statesman. Every family has a "lesser" -- a child that isn't as pretty as the others, isn't as smart or musical or charismatic as the others. It's up to us to transcend all that and find their own way. There would be no better tribute you could pay to your father than to find yours.

Labels: families, Ted Kennedy

And it already has:

Hannity on
Kennedy's death: "a lot of this was the politicizing of -- remember Paul Wellstone's
death?" Discussing Kennedy's death during his radio program, Sean Hannity asserted, "We've got The Wall Street Journal reporting -- and by the way, a
lot of this was the politicizing of -- remember Paul Wellstone's death? You know,
'Let's do everything for Paul.' And we're now being implored to get behind Obamacare because it's what Ted Kennedy would have wanted." [The Sean Hannity Show,
8/26/09]

Savage fill-in Markowski on possible naming of health care bill after Kennedy: "It's political theater" like the "Wellstone memorial." Chris Markowski, filling in for Michael Savage on his radio program, took a caller who said that "if Ted Kennedy had wanted his name on this health care bill, I think that he would -- I would want to see where he said that in writing before he died. He had plenty of time." Markowski responded, in part, by asserting: "I don't think he's requested -- you got to understand, it's a show. OK? It's political theater. Like the Democrats thought that whole Wellstone memorial was going to -- it was going to force them to -- it was going to allow them to win the Senate race in Minnesota. This is political theater. It's a show." [The Savage Nation, 8/26/09]

Lopez on Kennedy's death: Wellstone service "turned into a political rally." The National Review Online's Kathyrn Jean Lopez wrote in an August 26 post to the blog The Corner titled "Re: The Politics of Ted Kennedy's Passing": "All politicos need to remember the Wellstone funeral when a well-known politician dies. Instead of memorializing his life, his service turned into a political rally. Some of the MSNBC coverage today I'm catching looks like a [sic] Obamacare convocation. Human life is about more than poltics. And politics isn't American Idol. Or, even, The Lion of the Senate."

Allahpundit "sure" Kennedy "eulogies won't be politicized at all." Hot Air blogger Allahpundit wrote in an August 26 tweet: "Looking forward to the Democratic line-up at TK's memorial service. I'm sure the eulogies won't be politicized at all."

Instapundit: "A Wellstone Memorial on steroids?" An August 26 post on Instapundit.com linked to a post by JammieWearingFool with the headline "A Wellstone Memorial on steroids? And how did that work out?" JammieWearingFool asserted in the post, written the same day, "While we have no doubt the Democrats will do all they can to exploit his death and will probably have a Wellstone memorial on steroids, we'll stay above that." The link on the words "Wellstone memorial" were to an October 30,
2002, Slate.com article describing Wellstone's memorial services as a "pep
rally."

Noting "conservative talking point," Politico's Smith says "[i]t would seem odd to bar politics" from Kennedy's funeral. In an August 26 post, Politico's Ben Smith referred to the comments by Allahpundit and Instapundit as "a conservative talking point [that] is emerging to counter the the hope on the left that Kennedy's death will advance his cause of health care reform," and commented:

More...

I'll say this for them, they are disciplined. The hate all flows exactly the same way from every last one of them. They are really good at goose-stepping together. It's that authoritarian thing they have.

But while the right is terrified that the Kennedy memorials may serve to underscore just how much this man did for the have-nots and the have-lesses and how much the Republicans take pride in screwing over the average working American (see also: Tom Coburn:)

...let's look at what Al Franken wrote in 2006, talking about the Coretta Scott King memorial and setting the record straight on the Wellstone funeral:

To this day, there are still a lot of people, including Democrats, who've bought the right wing line on the Wellstone Memorial. Specifically, that it was a cynical, premeditated political event that included endless booing of Republican politicians who came to pay their respects to their fallen colleague. I wrote a pretty detailed account of the Wellstone Memorial in my book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, and nothing could be further from the truth. I did write that "reasonable people of good will were genuinely offended." The memorial was raucous and a couple of speakers said some things that were inappropriate - basically, let's win this (upcoming Senate) election for Paul.

There were also honest Republicans of good will, including Jim Ramstad - the Congressman from the Minneapolis suburban district I grew up in - who acted like human beings and cut the speakers who offended (Rick Kahn and, to a lesser degree, Mark Wellstone) a little slack because they understood that Rick had lost six very close friends and Mark had lost his father, mother, and sister.

The chapter was mainly about how cynically Republicans used the memorial politically as they complained that the Democrats had used it politically. And how the mainstream media, many of whom had neither attended the memorial nor seen it on TV, bought into the Republican spin.

Mainly, there was a lot of lying. Rush Limbaugh claimed that the audience was "planted," when, in fact, Twin Cities' radio and TV had to tell people to stay away because Williams Arena was jammed to capacity three hours before the Memorial was scheduled to begin. Thousands were crowded into an overflow gym to watch on a screen and thousands watched outside on a cold, late October night.

A pained Limbaugh asked his audience the day after the memorial: "Where was the grief? Where were the tears? Where was the memorial service? There wasn't any of this!"

This was a lie. I was there. Along with everyone else, I cried, I laughed, I cheered. It was, to my mind, a beautiful four-hour memorial.

I didn't boo. Neither did 22,800 of the some 23,000 people there. This has been a much discussed, much lied about aspect of the memorial. A number of Republicans, like Peggy Noonan and Weekly Standard writer Chris Caldwell claimed that 20,000 people had booed Trent Lott. (Caldwell claimed that 20,000 people booed a whole litany of people who weren't booed at all.) We'll never get an actual count - but I'd say about two hundred people booed Trent Lott when his face came on the Jumbotron. This was about a minute after 23,000 people cheered for Bill Clinton when his face appeared on the Jumbotron.

The Jumbotron was carrying the C-SPAN feed, and unless you were watching live, you almost certainly have never seen the moment that Trent Lott was booed. That's because none of the cable news shows repeated it. That's because you can't hear him being booed. And that's because so few people booed him. Also, I swear, it was a good-natured "kill the umpire" boo, (and Lott actually grinned) but I could never prove that. What I have proven is that you couldn't hear the boos on TV because on my book-on-tape I played the audio of the C-SPAN video to compare the 23,000 cheering for Clinton with the smattering of boos for Lott, and you CANNOT hear the boos.

Caldwell, who never saw the memorial, also wrote that there was almost no mention of the others who died on the plane. That was complete bull. There were beautiful eulogies for Will, Tom, and Mary.

Kellyanne (Fitzpatrick) Conway went on TV the day after the memorial and told a nationwide audience that the Jumbotron instructed the crowd "when to cheer and when to jeer." (The speeches were close-captioned and would indicate when there was LAUGHTER and APPLAUSE.)

Even though the words on the closed captioning followed the speaker's words by five or so seconds and were often misspelled, Sara Janecek, a Minnesota Republican lobbyist, said the speeches on the Jumbotron were proof that the speeches had been written and vetted by the cynically politically motivated Democrat who ran the event. Actually, the people who spoke at the Wellstone memorial were all chosen by the families of those who died. No one's speech was vetted. The Wellstone people had all spent the previous five days going to funerals. It never occurred to them to vet the speeches. The irony is that because they weren't thinking politically, they opened themselves to being accused of staging a political event..

It was the Republicans that tried to cheapen Paul Wellstone's life by dishonoring his death. It was the right-wing media, not the friends and family who spoke at the memorial or the people who came to it, that seized an opportunity to use a tragedy for political gain.

But as we know, with conservatives reality is immaterial. For the Republicans EVERYTHING is about scoring cheap political points with the very same frightened, down-sliding Americans they've spent the last nearly thirty years trying to push down into abject poverty so that they and their buddies can reap ALL the rewards of living in this country. If you liked feudal Europe, you'll LOVE Republican America. And we're well on their way there. It's only because of the efforts of people like Paul Wellstone and Ted Kennedy and Bernie Sanders and, we can only hope, Al Franken, that we aren't there yet.

But the wingnuts won't give up. The Republicans in Washington know who they're dealing with. They know that they are already reaping the fruits of the war on public education that they've been fighting since the 1960's:

American children aren't necessarily getting smarter or dumber, but that might not be good enough to compete globally, according to numbers cited Tuesday by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

He noted a special analysis put out last week by the National Center for Education Statistics that compares 15-year-old U.S. students with students from other countries in the Organization for Economic Development.

It found the U.S. students placed below average in math and science. In math, U.S. high schoolers were in the bottom quarter of the countries that participated, trailing countries including Finland, China and Estonia.

According to the report, the U.S. math scores were not measurably different in 2006 from the previous scores in 2003. But while other countries have improved, the United States has remained stagnant.

In science, the United States falls behind countries such as Canada, Japan and the Czech Republic.

Duncan told a room full of science and math experts of the National Science Board on Tuesday morning that this will hurt the United States as it competes internationally. "We are lagging the rest of the world, and we are lagging it in pretty substantial ways," he said.

I don't know how, when the media are willing to treat utter horsepuckey and demonstrable facts as two sides of an issue, we are supposed to fight back. It is beginning to dawn on me that perhaps the Great Experiement has failed after all.

I have a co-worker from China, who is raising a child here in this country. In China, parents are very strict with their children. My co-worker's parents, when they visit from China, are appalled at how permissive she is. And yet her daughter is already in rebellious teenager mode and she's not even ten yet -- because HER friends get to do whatever they want. This Chinese woman is stuck raising an American child, and American children are asked to do nothing they don't want to do. These are the adults of tomorrow. Their parents are the ones who can't be bothered to know what's going on in the world beyond the soccer team; the parents for whom Good Morning America constitutes news; the ones in my district who think Marge Roukema is still in Congress.

Republicans are reaping the rewards of the dumbing-down of America, and I'm not sure there is a damn thing we can do to reverse it.

Labels: Al Franken, Paul Wellstone, rant, Ted Kennedy, wingnuttia

The greatest fear most of us have is not even of death itself, but of the process of dying -- the image we have of being strapped to a bed in a hospital, covered with bedsores, in constant pain from the illness that's devouring us alive, unable to obtain relief because doctors are under orders not to turn us into opiate junkies, with tubes shoved into every orifice, unable even to scream. The whole point of end of life directives and living wills (full disclosure: I don't have one yet) is to make sure that our wishes for what we want are granted. Without such directives, it's up to our families to make such decisions, or in the absence of family, it's up to the medical profession to do whatever will be paid or whatever will avoid investigations and lawsuits.

People like Betsy McCaughey will have you believe that once you create such a directive, it is etched onto stone tablets and put in a vault locked from the inside, never to be changed ever again. On the contrary, If you change your mind after a diagnosis, and decide you WANT everything but the kitchen sink thrown at you, you WANT to try treatment after treatment, even if it's futile, because you're not ready to face death, you can still do so.

It is to the eternal shame of the Obama Administration, Democrats in the Senate and House, and the broadcast media, that they have allowed the McCaughey/Palin "death panel" smear to gain traction and credibility.

And in the middle of this foofarah comes Ted Kennedy one last time, to show us what the end can be when we decide how we want to live our last days:

As recently as a few days ago, Mr. Kennedy was still digging into big bowls of mocha chip and butter crunch ice creams, all smushed together (as he liked it). He and his wife, Vicki, had been watching every James Bond movie and episode of “24” on DVD.

He began each morning with a sacred rite of reading his newspapers, drinking coffee and scratching the bellies of his beloved Portuguese water dogs, Sunny and Splash, on the front porch of his Cape Cod house overlooking Nantucket Sound.

If he was feeling up to it, he would end his evenings with family dinner parties around the same mahogany table where he used to eat lobster with his brothers.

He took phone calls from President Obama, house calls from his priest and — just a few weeks ago — crooned after-dinner duets of “You Are My Sunshine” (with his son Patrick) and “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” (with Vicki).

“There were a lot of joyous moments at the end,” said Dr. Lawrence C. Horowitz, Mr. Kennedy’s former Senate chief of staff, who oversaw his medical care. “There was a lot of frankness, a lot of hugging, a lot of emotion.”

Obviously, Dr. Horowitz added, there were difficult times. By this spring, according to friends, it was clear that the tumor had not been contained; new treatments proved ineffective and Mr. Kennedy’s comfort became the priority.

But interviews with close friends and family members yield a portrait of a man who in his final months was at peace with the end of his life and grateful for the chance to savor the salty air and the company of loved ones.

Even as Mr. Kennedy’s physical condition worsened over the summer, he still got out of bed every day until Tuesday, when he died in the evening, said Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and one of Mr. Kennedy’s closest friends in the Senate.

“I’m still here,” Mr. Kennedy would call colleagues out of the blue to say, as if to refute suggestions to the contrary. “Every day is a gift,” was his mantra to begin conversations, said Peter Meade, a friend who met Mr. Kennedy as a 14-year-old volunteer on Mr. Kennedy’s first Senate campaign.

Some patients given a fatal diagnosis succumb to bitterness and self-pity; others try to cram in everything they have always wanted to do (sky-diving, a trip to China). Mr. Kennedy wanted to project vigor and a determination tokeep on going. He chose what he called “prudently aggressive” treatments.

[snip]

While Mr. Kennedy typically told people he felt well and vigorous, by spring it was becoming clear that his disease was advancing to where he could not spend his remaining months as he had hoped, helping push a health care plan through the Senate.

He left Washington in May, after nearly a half-century in the capital, and decamped to Cape Cod, where he would contribute what he could to the health care debate via phone and C-Span. He would sail as much as possible, with as little pain and discomfort as his caretakers could manage.

He also told friends that he wanted to take stock of his life and enjoy the gift of his remaining days with the people he loved most.

“I’ve had a wonderful life,” he said repeatedly, friends recalled.

Labels: Ted Kennedy

When you think of Senate Democrats these days, you think of people like Max Baucus, pocketing the cash of insurance companies as he works hard against any public option that would compete with companies that take our money and deny our claims. You think of Harry Reid, mewling first about how the Democrats are a minority, then about how they don't have 60 votes, then about how he doesn't have the Blue Dogs. Gutless. Absolutely gutless.

Who in the Senate, other than perhaps Bernie Sanders, will stand up now and do things like this:

Who will stand up like this for ordinary Americans now?

Labels: Ted Kennedy

NYT:

Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, a son of one of the most storied families in American politics, a man who knew triumph and tragedy in near-equal measure and who will be remembered as one of the most effective lawmakers in the history of the Senate, died late Tuesday night. He was 77.

The death of Mr. Kennedy, who had been battling brain cancer, was announced Wednesday morning in a statement by the Kennedy family, which was already mourning the death of the Senator’s sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver two weeks earlier.

“Edward M. Kennedy – the husband, father, grandfather, brother and uncle we loved so deeply – died late Tuesday night at home in Hyannis Port,” the statement said. “We’ve lost the irreplaceable center of our family and joyous light in our lives, but the inspiration of his faith, optimism, and perseverance will live on in our hearts forever.”

Mr. Kennedy had been in precarious health since he suffered a seizure in May 2008. His doctors determined the cause had been a malignant glioma, a brain tumor that often carries a grim prognosis.

As he underwent cancer treatment, Mr. Kennedy was little seen in Washington, appearing most recently at the White House in April as Mr. Obama signed a national service bill that bears the Kennedy name. Last week Mr. Kennedy urged Massachusetts lawmakers to change state law and let Gov. Deval Patrick appoint a temporary replacement upon his death, to assure that the state’s representation in Congress would not be interrupted by a special election.

While Mr. Kennedy had been physically absent from the capital in recent months, his presence had been deeply felt as Congress weighed the most sweeping revisions to America’s health care system in decades, an effort Mr. Kennedy called “the cause of my life.”

Health care "reform" that's going to require buying junk insurance that covers less than your policy, if you have one, does now aside, for those of us born in the 1950's, the death of Senator Kennedy is truly a knock on the ghoulish door that tells us we're next.

I'm sure that we're going to see the Usual Suspects popping up in the comments talking about Chappaquiddick, the incident that ruined Ted Kennedy's presidential aspirations forever. Funny, isn't it, how the narrative of sin and redemption comes into play when Republican politicians fall from grace, but where Ted Kennedy is concerned, thirty years of redemption isn't enough for them.

As the last of the Kennedy brothers leaves us, it's useful to note how different the Kennedys were from the Bushes. Old Joe Kennedy was as nasty a piece of work as any robber baron, but somewhere along the lines his sons got the idea that a career in public political life was about public service, not about getting the keys to the kingdom so that you can plunder the treasury to make your friends richer. I think that John Kennedy is sainted far beyond what is appropriate by virtue of being cut down before he had a chance to really screw up, and Bobby Kennedy too has joined the ranks of the mythologized, his assassination being the first real inkling that baby boomers had that the dice were loaded.

But Ted Kennedy, who seemed to me to be the Lesser Brother, the Designated Family Shithead of the Kennedy clan, the also-ran, carried the family baggage -- the drinking and the womanizing -- with far less aplomb than his brothers. And yet after their deaths, and especially the horrific wake-up call that took place in Chappaquiddick, Ted Kennedy became arguably the greatest of the Kennedy brothers.

Kennedy was an unabashed liberal from a wealthy family; something you rarely see today in this age of "I've got mine and fuck you" coming from all income levels. His causes were those that make the lives of ordinary Americans better: Civil rights. Health care. Labor and work. Education. Today, politicians from wealthy families (see also: George W. Bush, Mitt Romney) represent the interests of their cronies and friends. Ted Kennedy, older than Bush and Romney, recognized that Americans born without his advantages should have a piece of the pie too. You never heard of corporations buying Teddy Kennedy's vote. Perhaps they knew they couldn't.

Much has been made of the long friendship between Kennedy and Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch. This is a friendship that could never happen in the Senate today without the Democratic Senator being a Blue Dog or a Joe Lieberman, willing to expose his belly to the Republican bully in the duo. With Kennedy's death, Orrin Hatch is now free to join the frothing, sweating, screeching wingnuts of his party in assuming that those on the other side of the aisle are not intelligent people of goodwill who disagree, but are unworthy of even being called Americans. That's why Kennedy's death is yet another nail in the coffin of the nation in which I grew up. The Senate used to be a place in which those in opposition would actually sit together and compromise, not the capitulation by Democrats that constitutes "bipartisanship" these days. Perhaps neither party was completely ecstatic with what resulted, but by and large Americans were reasonably content with their lot. Then in 1980, it all changed, and we got the Reagan legacy of pummelling the opposition into the ground and then defecating on it while it's spitting dirt out of its mouth and wiping its bloody nose. This is what politics have become in the post-Kennedy era which began long before the Lion of the Senate's death.

We've all known that this day was coming ever since we heard the words "malignant glioma" last year. Those of us born in the 1950's read Death Be Not Proud as kids and knew what "glioma" meant. But even so, and especially after Kennedy's rousing speech (which turned out to be his farewell to his party) at last year's Democratic convention, we still sort of thought he'd go on forever, because, well, in some ways he WAS the Senate.

The next generation of Kennedys has dabbled in politics a bit, but with the exception of Ted's son Patrick, none are currently on the national political stage, thereby proving that at least for the Kennedy family (Caroline Kennedy's ill-fated toe-dip into the waters of Hillary Clinton's Senate seat notwithstanding), the sense of dynastic entitlement runs nowhere near as strong as it does in the Bush family, where Poppy is looking at Jeb's son George P. and salivating over what he thinks are guaranteed Latino votes for one of his son's "little brown ones". The younger (now middle-aged themselves) Kennedys are still involved in public service, albeit in a quieter way.

Edward M. Kennedy lived a good and full life, even with all its flaws and and the tragic, fatal mistake of Chappaquiddick. It's about all any of us can ask. But when we look at the state of politics today as compared to his family's heyday, as we look at Barack Obama, his community organizing years long behind him as he hobnobs on the golf course with the president of a bank being investigated for running illegal tax shelters, the death of Senator Kennedy just whacks us over the head with the knowledge that the days of statesmanship are over for good.

More from Bustednuckles, who pre-emptively kneecaps the "What about Chappaquiddick?" crowd far more effectively than I do.

Labels: obituaries, Ted Kennedy

Leave it to Ted Kennedy, that feisty old codger, to be the one person in America who beats brain cancer:

Sen. Edward Kennedy’s brain cancer is in remission and he is expected back in the Senate after the Memorial Day recess to spearhead healthcare reform, according to Democratic colleagues.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Tuesday that he spoke with Kennedy’s wife, Vicki, in the past few days and was told the 77-year-old lawmaker is “doing fine.”

Reid said Kennedy’s cancer is in remission and added that while the lawmaker is going through another regiment of treatment, the procedure “is not unusual.”

“This is something we expected,” he said.

Kennedy, the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, has been mostly absent from the chamber for the past year, recovering in Florida and Massachusetts.

He is expected to lead a markup of highly anticipated health reform legislation in his first month back - one of the biggest bills of the year and a signature domestic initiative for President Obama.

Brain cancer? In REMISSION? This just never, ever happens. But with Ted Kennedy it has.

Note to all the Christofascist zombies in the Republican Party who think that health care for everyone is somehow anti-Christian: If God didn't want universal health care, he wouldn't have put Ted Kennedy's brain cancer into remission. Of course remission isn't cure, but we rarely hear remission used in the context of brain cancers.

So there.

Labels: health care, snark, Ted Kennedy

There. I said it.

When you grew up when I did, it's sometimes hard to understand why people get all blubbery at Memorial Day parades, or when "Yankee Doodle Dandy" is played, or when the flag is raised. When the images of your youth are of black people being sprayed with hoses while dogs bark, or young people screaming in the streets and being maced and beaten by cops, or of a young woman weeping over the corpse of a college student shot down by National Guard troops at a student protest, or of the napalmed bodies of people living in a village in Vietnam who did nothing to us, the word "patriotism" can be an empty one. When the people who refuse to admit that what we're doing in Vietnam is wrong slap bumper stickers on their cars that say "America: Love it or leave it" and refer to everyone who disagrees with them as "Communists", it's sometimes hard to think about love of country. And yet I think somewhere deep down inside, I always wished I could.

I knew what this country had done for my grandparents, all of whom came over from Russia and Poland with nothing. My paternal grandparents never quite made it out of poverty, but their sons both went to college, went into the Army, and were helped by the GI bill. My maternal grandfather was a district manager for a department store chaiin, and my grandmother had her own store for a while. The life I live today is because of the work they did in a country that gave them a chance. That's an American story, as Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill said so marvelously last night, and it's one I forget sometimes.

It's easy to forget these American stories when we see our leaders trampling on everything that my grandparents believed this country to be as their ships landed in New York. It's easy to forget the beacon of hope this country used to be for my grandparents and so many others who came here before and after them -- before fearmongering politicians and would-be dictators decided that their power and their aggrandizement was more important than the country for which the flag they give such lip service to protecting stands.

I've seen many of these conventions in my lifetime, and there's a kind of reassuring continuity in their very hokeyness -- the three-sided state signs, the relentless bad pop music, the buttons and stickers and silly hats and people decked out in all manner of swag. Democratic conventions in particular are snapshots of the melting pot in action, with far more than just a few black people scattered around the arena in a demonstration that E Pluribus Unum isn't just something to put on money. But this year is different, because this year the people of color aren't just out in the audience or Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton grudgingly given face time amidst hopes they don't do anything to alienate what the media so gingerly refer to as "the low information voter."

I'm usually able to resist when someone is really setting out to jerk my chain. I'm especially able to do so when the person in question is named "Steven Spielberg." But every four years, I watch the prime time hours of the Democratic National Convention, and for a few short days I understand why people fly flags in front of their houses. And last night brought the emotionality, the intense symbolism of this quadrennial exercise in self-congratulation to new heights.

For those of us born in the 1950's, The name "Kennedy" has carried a certain magic -- less so for people like me, whose Democratic parents practically worshipped the ground Adlai Stevenson walked on and regarded John F. Kennedy as the same kind of usurper that it seems many Hillary Clinton supporters feel. But even if you weren't swept up on the Camelot mystique, the Kennedys were always present in public life.

For Americans in general, the Kennedy Thing has largely receded in recent years. The political careers of the many Kennedy children have been either aborted (Joe III) largely quiet (Patrick), or short (Kathleen Kennedy Townsend). The death of John Kennedy, Jr. virtually assured that the last of the Kennedys to make a significant mark on the political scene was going to be the old lion himself, "Uncle Ted."

For sheer political stagecraft, it's hard to top last night. The last surviving child of the martyred president/myth/icon, every inch of her an undisputable Kennedy, emerging from a largely private life to help her terminally uncle pass the family torch one last time to a new, young, charismatic leader with a picture-perfect young family.

You could practically hear the gasbags of talk radio already screaming "Chappaquiddick!Chappaquiddick! Chappaquiddick!" -- because they have nothing else to say -- but you can't deny the power of the last of the Brothers Kennedy, puffy from steroids, only months after brain surgery, standing on his own one last time at a Democratic National Convention and roar from the stage about health care. At this point, a right-wing pundit corps that approves torture, that continues to support a war based on lies that has claimed the lives of over 4000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, that defends an executive branch that is criminally rotten to the core, and that's clearly inciting people like this to try to kill the nominee, no longer has anything to say about Kennedy's behavior that night long ago.

But the real question of the night was not How Would Kennedy Do, because you knew that he'd do fine -- but How Would Michelle Do. I don't know if the "low information voters" (you know....morons), who clasp the notion that she's the second coming of Angela Davis to their chests as if it were a treasured talisman, were swayed, but I don't think Michelle Obama could have done any better.

As some others have noted, it's a shame that Michelle Obama has to hide her level of accomplishment and the finely honed horsepuckey detector that makes her so appealing to people like me. It's a shame that the "Nick and Nora Charles" wisecracking part of her relationship with her husband has to be put on hold, lest those people be intimidated who have stupidly been voting against their own best interest for almost thirty years because Republicans are better at cheap symbolism. Funny how the PUMAs, with their Ellen Jamesian obsession with Hillary Clinton, don't seem to care one whit about how Michelle Obama has to frame herself as ONLY a mom in order to pass muster with the same "hard-working Americans...white Americans" to whom their icon so pointedly referred during the primaries.

On the other hand, if you have two little girls like these, the older one already showing the her mother's poise and elegance, it would be hard to want to frame yourself as anything else:



But even if we wish it were possible for Americans to wrap their minds around the notion that a woman can have a high-powered career AND be a great mom, or she can just as easily choose to do one OR the other, and still be a woman who is valued in our society, I'm glad that this country, too much of which only knows Michelle Obama from right-wing pundists and smear e-mails and a magazine cover that perpetuates the very lies it tries to spoof, got to see the Michelle Obama that our nominee fell in love with almost twenty years ago.

I have no doubt that the speech was carefully written for just that purpose, and that Michelle Obama worked hard to keep that soft tone in her speech that's so different from when we've heard her snarking about her husband's smelly feet. If you want to be really churlish, you might say that trotting those kids out on stage is the height of political cynicism. But in a campaign that's loudly and clearly showing all the signs that too many Americans simply can't deal with anything that differs in any way from their own lives and their own backgrounds, who are willing to believe that a guy with a funny name can't possibly be a "real American" and who will believe the fliers about which Tweety talked about last night (but only after giving the Republican plants who are duping disgruntled Hillarions air time), that claim he's a "registered Muslim" (you have to register to be a Muslim??), Michelle Obama's job was to convince these mor...I mean, "low information voters", that though her skin color may be different, and that she has this exotic last name of her husband's, the experience of being a mom is color-blind. Of course I think she succeeded smashingly. We'll see what the rest of America thinks.

I will say this much, though. Watching this woman on the podium last night, introducing her husband as the nominee, and invoking both Martin Luther King AND Hillary Clinton, and watching the faces of black women in the audience, listening, rapt, with tears rolling down their cheeks, I can honestly say that perhaps for the first (and I hope not the last) time, I am really, really proud of my country.

(UPDATE: I thought this was a pretty good post about Michelle Obama's speech until I read what Sara wrote. Damn.)

Labels: Democratic National Convention, Michelle Obama, Ted Kennedy

Joe Scarborough is working furiously already this morning to push the "If Obama loses..." meme. So much for "liberal" MSNBC, eh? But not even Scarborough is going to be able to throw cold water on this development:

In a development that is sure to bring the house down, US Senator Edward M. Kennedy is expected to attend the Democratic National Convention, most likely to deliver a speech tomorrow night.

Kennedy is battling brain cancer, and his doctors are said to be worried that his treatment has compromised his immune system and that attending the convention could put him at further risk. Still, the senator has recently told people that he has a speech written for the convention and that he badly wants to come, pending a final medical consultation.

Buzz has built among Massachusetts politicos that Kennedy would come, and today a source close to the family confirmed that he had made a decision to come.

Ever since it began back in February to appear likely that Barack Obama would be the nominee, we had a pretty good idea that there was going to be some kind of symbolic torch-passing by Ted Kennedy from his family to Obama; a demonstration of the culmination of the civil rights legacy for which Kennedy's brother fought, as in a speech from June 1963 in which he said:

This is one country. It has become one country because all of us and all the people who came here had an equal chance to develop their talents. We cannot say to ten percent of the population that you can't have that right; that your children cannot have the chance to develop whatever talents they have; that the only way that they are going to get their rights is to go in the street and demonstrate. I think we owe them and we owe ourselves a better country than that.

Therefore, I'm asking for your help in making it easier for us to move ahead and to provide the kind of equality of treatment which we would want ourselves; to give a chance for every child to be educated to the limit of his talents.

As I've said before, not every child has an equal talent or an equal ability or equal motivation, but they should have the equal right to develop their talent and their ability and their motivation, to make something of themselves.

What we didn't see at the time that the torch was going to be more than metaphorical, as a terminally ill Kennedy stands up for what is probably the last time at a Democratic convention, to speak for the nomination of a man who is the living embodiment of that legacy.

I get all blubbery just thinking about it. I can't wait.

Labels: Barack Obama, Democratic National Convention, Ted Kennedy