The lion of the Senate: Empathy, obligation, civil partisanship

LAT: Tim Rutten
The lion of the Senate
Empathy, public service and civility have distinguished Ted Kennedy's long tenure.
May 21, 2008

Change is in the air this political season....

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A new world, surely, and one he helped usher in. But also one that seems to be unfolding without three qualities that distinguished Kennedy's long service.

The first is empathy. It's shocking just how tenuous belief in the possibility of empathy as a public emotion has become. Kennedy's brother, Bobby, was fond of quoting the ancient Greeks. One of them, Thucydides, once was asked, "When will there be justice in Athens?" He replied, "There will be justice in Athens when those who are not injured are as outraged as those who are."

If Ted Kennedy's 46 years in the Senate have stood for anything, it is for the enduring power of that antique insight. He is a rich, wonderfully connected Boston Irishman, and yet his life's labors have been on behalf of blacks and women and Latinos, for people who sweated for a minimum wage and couldn't pay their sick child's doctor's bill and asked for nothing more than a public school good enough to give their child a fair foothold on the ladder's next rung. Their slights and injuries were his own....

Child of privilege that he undoubtedly was, Kennedy also stood for a second quality that is fading: the belief that after the accumulation of wealth came an ambition -- indeed, an obligation -- for public service....

Finally, one of the reasons Kennedy's Senate comrades will feel his departure so acutely is that he always stood for a civil partisanship. There was no more committed liberal Democrat in that chamber.

A struggle with Kennedy was a bare-knuckle fight to the finish, but always according to traditional politics' version of the Marquess of Queensberry Rules. It was never personal, and differences never precluded friendship, which is why the senior Massachusetts senator could work with George Bush or John McCain or Orrin Hatch, and will leave office with a record as one of the most effective lawmakers of all time. Nothing deforms our contemporary politics in quite the way the loss of Kennedy's old-fashioned civility does....

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-rutten21-2008may21,0,59962.column?track=mostviewed-storylevel