Steady Teddy: with a dashing opponent closing in and an unpopular President weighing him down, liberal icon Ted Kennedy may be shown the door after three decades in the Senate - Cover Story

National Review, Nov 7, 1994 by Dave Brudnoy

EVERY six years, as he steps forward to let the masses know of his availability for continued occupancy of the governmental seat to which he is entitled by divine right, Edward Moore Kennedy, the Senior Senator from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, hears a familiar refrain: this year things will be different; this year there will be an opponent of more than token significance; this year those irritating Republicans have managed to find somebody who'll give him a run for his money.

And each year it is a delusion, floated hopefully by the Republicans, who wonder just how long the dynasty can last, and given a bit of credence by the media, which find the routine slaughter of the GOP innocent by the savvy senior senator a bore. Had you time and curiosity enough, you could go back to the early 1960s and trace the delusions that have led those who would defeat him and those who would chronicle the defeat to miss the point, and the boat. The S.S. Kennedy has been unsinkable.

At least until now. Or is this just another media myth bearing no relation to reality? This is not my first NR piece on why this year is different from all other years, but one must hope that it will be my last. We are coterminous on the scene, Ted and I, I having come up to Massachusetts from New Haven in 1962, he having arrived at the age of 30, just old enough to take over the Senate seat occupied until then by the compliant college pal of his brother, the President.

The Myth of Ineffectuality

ONE OF the myths spread by people who don't like Ted Kennedy is that he is ineffectual. The rap should be that he is effectual, and we dearly wish he weren't. Who can forget his hysterical attack on Robert Bork? If confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice, Kennedy said, Bork would bring back an America of back-alley abortions, Negroes pushed to the rear of the bus, and other vivid images of Reaction Rife. Bork didn't become a Supreme Court Justice, but Ted Kennedy won re-election by a sizable margin the next time he was up.

Indeed, except for the 54.2 per cent squeaker back in 1962, all of his victories have been gratifyingly unambiguous. After a special two-year term, he ran again in 1964, having suffered a broken back in a plane accident. He triumphed in 1970, in the wake of Chappaquiddick, running against who can remember whom?--though I do remember being sought as the candidate by some Bay State conservatives who thought a young doctoral candidate and NR essayist would make a nifty sacrificial lamb. On through 1976, 1982, 1988, and now, you would think, an election that will extend his tenure in the Senate into the first days of the twenty-first century.

Ted's success, of course, is partly due to his status as torchbearer for The Family. If you want to experience a little despair around election time, tune in to a local talk program as the devoted Kennedy worshippers call to insist that since The Family has given so much--Joe, Jack, Bobby--it is unseemly even to contemplate a vote for anyone else. This cohort may be aging and dying off, but in Massachusetts the argument has long legs.

Still, nostalgia and dynasty worship aren't sufficient to explain Kennedy's three decades of highly impressive electoral victories. Far from ineffectual, he has been the very model of a modern tax-spend liberal. Ted Kennedy could not have voted as he has and repeatedly won re-election in Mississippi or in Utah, and his one odd miscalculation, the attempt to replace Jimmy Carter in 1980, demonstrated how tightly wound are the Bay State tethers binding Kennedy to those who love him.

Of course, Democratic senators across the country have perfected the technique of voting left for five years and then speaking right come election time. But there was an almost engaging effrontery about Senator Kennedy's recent speech supporting a bill to restrain unfunded federal mandates. "I am deeply concerned that the costs of meeting federal requirements," he said, "are making it harder and harder for many communities to hire more teachers, more police officers, or more firefighters ... Congress must be sensitive to the burdens federal legislation may impose on state and local governments."

A Lot of Mandates

THIRTY-TWO years in the Senate amounts to a lot of legislation, including decades of unfunded mandates, particularly of the hug-a-tree variety so popular with the Vice President. Kennedy's record of support for such mandates is almost dutiful; it includes votes for the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the Coastal Zone Management Act, the Water Pollution Control Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, the Superfund Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, and the Occupational Safety and Health Act. Most of these votes were attacked by fiscal conservatives as piling huge burdens on local governments and private businesses that did not always have the economic strength to bear them. And not just by fiscal conservatives. The U.S. Conference of Mayors generally counts as a moderate-to-liberal forum; but its study of the impact of unfunded federal mandates concluded that their total cost for 1993 came to $6.4 billion, and the projected costs for 1994-98 amount to an astounding $54 billion.