Legal Commentary

Digby On Kennedy

By Big Tent Democrat

She writes a great one, but this is the best part:

John McCain said the other day that Kennedy's great gift was in making concessions to Republicans. That may be correct, but not in the way McCain meant it to be. Kennedy's great gift was fighting for progress without shame or obfuscation, making the moral argument for liberalism, and always trying to move the ball forward, inch by inch if that's all he could get and in great leaps if the opportunity presented itself. If he made the right concessions, it sure as hell wasn't in service of McCain's pinched and cruel agenda.

He was everything the conservatives hate: a proud, fighting liberal who didn't shirk from the label. Each day his presence was a rebuke to everything they believed in. . . . And all the while, Kennedy just kept going, getting more concessions from Republicans by being true to his principles, than mealy mouthed centrism ever did. There's a lesson in that.

(Emphasis supplied.) Matt Yglesias remarkably points to Kennedy's 1980 concession speech as some sort of paean to pragmatic capitulation - in his campaign to gain pre-approval for an Obama health care reform cave in. It shows how little he understands what Ted Kennedy did and was. Digby got it.

Speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on August 26, 2009 (boomark / email).