Tag Archives: Ted Kennedy

national news, political news

Why not Bernie for VP?

Cassidy-Bernie-Sanders-Loud-and-Clear-1200

The more I think about it, the more plausible it’s beginning to sound.

Bernie Sanders well might become Hillary Clinton’s running mate against Donald J. Trump.

I had been thinking all along that Clinton might look more toward someone with, say, a Hispanic background. Former San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro — who’s now housing secretary in the Obama administration — was a logical choice.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s name has popped up. That’s an interesting pick, too. An all-woman Democratic ticket? You go, girls!

But now it seems quite possible that Sen. Sanders — who’s been battle-tested and proven to be up to the fight — might be the right kind of No. 2 to challenge Trump and whomever he selects as his running mate.

Sanders already has pulled Clinton to the left on some of his pet issues: income inequality, war in the Middle East to name just two.

At one level, he’s already won the ideological fight within the Democratic Party. Indeed, if he’s not chosen, I truly can hear Sanders making a “the dream shall never die” speech at the Democratic convention, echoing the stirring address given by vanquished Sen. Ted Kennedy at the 1980 convention that re-nominated President Carter.

However, if Clinton picks Sanders as her VP nominee, then he’ll continue the fight forward.

One obvious drawback is his age. He’s 74. He’d be 79 at the end of a first Clinton term. There might be a commitment to serve just one term as vice president if a President Clinton were to seek re-election in 2020.

Of course, only the candidate knows who she’s going to pick.

As for Trump, he said he’s narrowed his list to “five or six” individuals. He vows to pick an actual Republican and someone with “political experience.” He, too, has a list of former rivals he might consider, although at least two of them — Sen. Ted Cruz and Gov. John Kasich — have all but told Trump to jump in the proverbial lake before asking either of them to run with him.

The mystery of who’ll be running for president in the fall has just about been solved.

Now we’ll await these important choices for the No. 2 spots.

I’m starting to “feel the Bern.”

 

national news

Not exactly Felix and Oscar, however …

The Hill calls them Washington, D.C.’s newest “odd couple.”

They are Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Barack H. Obama, the Democratic president of the United States of America.

McConnell has been saying nice things about the man he once pledged to make a “one-term president.” The one-term notion didn’t work out, as Obama was re-elected in 2012. But hey, life goes on.

Washington’s new odd couple: McConnell and Obama

I rather like the idea of these men becoming “friends,” even if it’s a relationship of convenience.

They aren’t the first national political leaders to link arms and find common ground in an Oscar Madison-Felix Unger sort of way.

Let’s go back to the 1960s, when Democratic President Lyndon Johnson and Republican Senate Leader Everett Dirksen teamed up to help enact the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts. How about when Republican President Ronald Reagan and Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill would bash each other in public, but then toast each other over whiskey after hours? Democratic President Bill Clinton and GOP Speaker Newt Gingrich worked together to balance the federal budget. Republican President George W. Bush and Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy found common ground in pushing education reform through Congress.

See? It can be done, ladies and gentlemen.

McConnell and Obama are on the same page regarding international trade. The president, in fact, is finding his stiffest opposition coming from the left-wing base of his own party. But he’s got a pal on the other side of the aisle.

The arrangement doesn’t surprise some Capitol Hill hands. “It validates what McConnell has been saying for the last six and a half years. If the president wants to join us on something that’s good for the country, we will work with him. This is an example of that,” said Don Stewart, McConnell’s spokesman.

Well, for what it’s worth, some of us out here in the Heartland are surprised.

And pleasantly so, at that.

 

political news

New folks hogging all the air time

Ted Cruz has done it. So has Tom Cotton. The two Republican senators,  from Texas and Arkansas, respectively, have managed to muscle their way onto our TV screens and into our local newspapers with their actions, even though they’ve been on the job such a short time.

Same with Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts. She’s been on the job about two years and she’s everyone’s go-to gal when the subject of Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy comes up.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/04/01/elizabeth_warren_dems_must_emphasize_differences_with_gop.html

I posted a blog earlier this week about the late Edward Kennedy’s adherence to Senate tradition, how he didn’t make a floor speech until he’d been in office for a year.

https://highplainsblogger.com/2015/04/01/r-i-p-ted-kennedys-u-s-senate/

All bets are off these days. The new folks are not bashful at all about hogging up media air time and space.

Cruz is running for president. Cotton drafted that letter to the Iranian mullahs and recommended they reject a nuclear deal worked out by the United States.

Now it’s Warren.

Didn’t she say she “is not a candidate for president” in 2016? Why are the media still digging around the roots of that story?

Is she going to challenge Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party primary or not? I thought she was declarative in her statement about not running. Oh, wait. She spoke in the present tense. “I am not running,” she said, if memory serves. That means the door is still slightly open for her to change her mind.

These new senators — and House members, too — are overshadowing the senior members.

Republican Orrin Hatch? He’s nowhere to be seen or heard. Democrat Barbara Boxer? She’s announced her impending retirement — and that’s been it. Republican Thad Cochran? He almost lost the GOP primary in Mississippi but got renominated on the strength of African-Americans who didn’t want the other guy to win. Democrat Patty Murray? She’s been as quiet as Hatch.

The new folks keep showing up. They’re everywhere.

The “new normal” in Washington is to let the newbies have the floor.

 

national news, political news

R.I.P., Ted Kennedy's U.S. Senate

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President Barack Obama was among many dignitaries gathered this week in Boston to honor the opening of an institute that tells the story of the U.S. Senate.

The Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate honors a place that the late Massachusetts Democrat served for more than three decades. The Senate that Kennedy served no longer exists, according to the president.

What a shame.

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/03/letter-from-boston-obama-says-kennedys-senate-is-dead-116516.html?hp=b1_r3

Ted Kennedy was admired and reviled. His friends cherished his loyalty. His foes loathed his ferocity.

Kennedy, though, had this amazing ability to make friends across the political aisle. Many of his former political foes came to Boston to remember him for his wit and for the good cheer he spread among those he met.

Where is that collegiality now? Barack Obama wondered how the Senate functions today.

“What if we carried ourselves more like Ted Kennedy? What if we worked to follow his example a little bit harder?” Obama said. “People fight to get in the Senate, and then they’re afraid. We fight to get these positions and then don’t want to do anything with them. Ted understood the only reason to get these positions is to get something done.”

No, the late Liberal Lion was far from perfect. He had his faults and demons. He behaved badly off the clock at times in his life. Despite his occasional missteps, Kennedy knew how to legislate. He worked well with others, which in a legislative body comprising 100 occasionally monstrous egos is an essential element of good government.

Kennedy also knew about tradition and believed it meant something important. As Politico reported: “Kennedy waited a year to deliver his first speech on the Senate floor, Obama recalled at the institute, noting dryly that ‘that’s no longer the custom.’ (Freshman Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton had barely been sworn in before he riled up the White House over his own maiden speech and his open letter attacking the Iran talks.) The president looked over to former Senate majority leaders Trent Lott and Tom Daschle, joking that they could talk about the time when traditions meant something, though he left out his own impatient ambition that led him to announce a presidential campaign two years into his first term.”

There’s a glimmer of hope, though, for the Senate.

Edward M. Kennedy can’t come back. A constructive U.S. Senate is able to rebuild itself, however, into an institution that relearns how to build consensus across the aisle and avoid demonizing the other side as being an “enemy” of the common good.

national news, political news

Cruz the Hawk a no-show at Armed Services

You hear about this occasionally.

U.S. senators or House members take office and immediately become what’s known as “show horses,” not workhorses. A young Illinois Democratic senator, Barack Obama, demonstrated little interest in the nuts and bolts of legislating before launching his bid for the presidency. Flash back to the mid-1960s, and another young Democratic senator from New York, the late Robert Kennedy, showed equally little interest in these matters — unlike his kid brother, Ted, who became one of the Senate’s legislative giants.

So, what gives with Ted Cruz, the Republican from Texas, who’s also running for president?

He’s a serious hawk on defense, but he’s rung up the worst attendance record by far on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/03/ted-cruz-2016-armed-services-committee-attendance-116522.html?hp=lc2_4

While the young senator has been MIA at the panel’s hearings, many of his colleagues are settling in to do the people’s business. Several of them have perfect attendance. Others have been called away on other official business; Committee Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., missed a key hearing because he was part of a U.S. delegation sent to Saudi Arabia to honor the late Saudi King Abdullah.

Back to the man I like to refer to as the Cruz Missile.

Sure, he’s running for president. These campaigns gobble up a lot of lawmakers’ time. However, just as it matters for all the individuals who’ve run for president before, it matters now for Sen. Cruz.

Is he going to do what he’s getting paid to do, which is study, debate and vote on key issues affecting his country and the state he represents? Or is he going to remain absent from his day job while pursuing another office down the street from the one he already occupies?

 

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Ford had it right on Nixon pardon

A friend posed this question on Facebook in response to my blog post on the 40th anniversary of President Nixon’s resignation.

He asked about my thoughts relating to President Ford’s pardon of Nixon barely a month after taking office on Aug. 9, 1974.

Here it is: President Ford did the right thing.

I’ll add that at the time I didn’t agree with the decision to grant a full and complete pardon. I was barely 25 years old at the time and I suppose I wanted my pound of flesh from the former president. Nixon, after all, had clobbered Sen. George McGovern in the 1972 election, dashing my hopes after working for McGovern in Multnomah County, Ore., and after casting my first-ever vote in a presidential election.

That was then.

Time, as they say, has this way of tempering one’s anger.

It has done so with me.

I grew to respect Gerald Ford immensely over the years. I now understand why he did what he did so early in his presidency. He did it to spare the nation the heartache of a possible trial for crimes that President Nixon committed against the nation, the Constitution and, yes, rank-and-file Americans.

I wasn’t alone in looking critically at the president’s decision to pardon his immediate predecessor. Nor am I alone in recognizing President Ford’s decision.

Not too many years before his death, President Ford received the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award granted annually by the JFK Library and Museum in Boston. The man who presented the award to the former president was one of his harshest critics at the time of the pardon: the late Sen. Ted Kennedy.

Kennedy turned to Ford and said, in effect: “Mr. President, I was wrong to criticize that decision.”

The president did perform a courageous political act. It well might have cost him his election to the presidency in 1976.

It was the right thing to do.

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If Brown wins in N.H., Dems in for a miserable night

One of the interesting things to watch in this year’s mid-term elections in November will be the returns in New Hampshire.

New Hampshire is in the Eastern Time Zone and we’ll know right away whether a U.S. Senate seat flips from Democratic to Republican. If it turns from Blue to Red, I’m quite sure that the Democratic Party is going to be in for a very long, miserable, painful evening of watching election returns.

Why is the New Hampshire race so critical?

For starters, the incumbent is a Democrat seeking her second term, Jean Shaheen, a popular former governor. Additionally, her main Republican challenger is a carpetbagger, a former senator from across the state line in Massachusetts, Scott Brown.

Brown also is a big hitter with some serious star power, owing to his first term in the Senate representing the Bay State. He was elected to the seat held for a zillion years by the late Ted Kennedy, who died in 2009. Brown lost his seat when he ran for re-election in 2012.

He then set his sights up yonder, in New Hampshire. He has formed an exploratory committee, which usually is a formality preceding a declaration of his candidacy. He’ll declare his candidacy soon.

Shaheen’s popularity is being undermined by the unpopularity of the man in the White House, Democratic President Barack Obama. The president’s low poll numbers will provide Brown the best opportunity to exploit Shaheen’s incumbency.

Whether it will be enough for him to win is anyone’s guess at the moment.

If he does win, and the news networks project Brown winning in New Hampshire early in the evening, then I’m thinking the Senate will be destined to turn from Democratic to Republican control when the night is over. The GOP needs to pick up six Senate seats to win control of the place. A Brown victory will serve as a precursor to a long night, indeed, for Democrats.

However, a Shaheen victory might spell a different kind of evening for Democrats and Republicans.

My guess right now is that a Shaheen win could reduce Republican gains to something just short of outright control of the Senate.

Even so, Democrats all across the country at this moment should be afraid … very afraid.

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Political foes can become friends

These kinds of stories give me hope that all may not be lost in U.S. politics.

Former first lady Barbara Bush says she “loves Bill Clinton.” She might not agree with him politically, but she is truly fond of the 42nd president of the United States, who in 1992 defeated the 41st president — Barbara’s husband, George.

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/195946-barbara-bush-i-love-bill-clinton

Democrat President Harry Truman detested his successor, Republican Dwight Eisenhower. They reportedly grew closer as the nation mourned the assassination of Ike’s successor, John F. Kennedy.

GOP President Gerald Ford and Democrat Jimmy Carter waged a fierce campaign in 1976. Carter won, but the new president and his immediate predecessor forged a warm friendship that lasted until Ford’s death.

Carter never developed that kind of relationship with Ronald Reagan, who beat him in 1980, nor did Reagan form a bond with Walter Mondale, whom he clobbered four years later in a landslide re-election.

George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton’s friendship seems to be real. Mrs. Bush talks about her husband becoming the father Clinton never had. She says President Clinton visits the Bushes annually. “We don’t talk politics,” Mrs. Bush says.

You hear about these kind of inter-party friendships from time to time. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, had a warm friendship with the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass. Talk about coming from differing ideologies, parties, lifestyles, cultures … you name it. Yet they were big-time pals.

One of President Barack Obama’s closest friends in the Senate today is Republican Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. You can list all the differences there, too, and wonder how these men — and their wives — have become so close.

Too little of this kind of camaraderie exists today, with partisans on either side viewing the other guy as the enemy, rather than just a political adversary.

Take a lesson, folks? Given the nastiness of the campaign her husband waged against Bill Clinton, there’s reason to believe you can make nice with your foes.

One word of advice, however: Don’t ask the 41st president his feelings about H. Ross Perot, the third man in that 1992 campaign. His feelings for the Texas billionaire aren’t nearly so magnanimous.