Ted Kennedy, the liberal lion, dead at 77

 “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,” the Kennedy family said in a statement sent to reporters just before 2 a.m. Wednesday.

Elected first in 1962, the 77-year-old Massachusetts liberal was rooted in the civil rights and Great Society battles of that decade,but his enduring strength was an ability to renew himself through his mastery of issues and the changing personalities of the Senate.

Nowhere was this clearer than in Kennedy’s early support of Barack Obama in 2008, when the young Illinois Democrat needed to establish himself against more veteran rivals for the White House. Kennedy not only campaigned for Obama but, at risk to his own health, opened the Democratic National Convention a year ago in Denver and returned to Washington repeatedly last winter to cast needed votes to move the new president’s economic recovery agenda.

The arc between their careers was striking. Obama was born just a year before Kennedy came to the Senate in November 1962, and the younger man’s election as president marked an historic fulfillment of the civil rights debate in which Kennedy took part as a freshman lawmaker.

There were bittersweet moments too as the senator’s illness took its toll.

August found Obama vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard, just across the water from the Cape Cod home where Kennedy lay ill. And the senator couldn’t fully participate in the great health care debate, which had been his passion for decades and remains central to Obama’s legislative agenda.

As moving about the Capitol became more difficult, Kennedy didn’t return after an appearance in April. And despite early hopes, he was never strong enough to be the player he wanted to be as a health care bill moved through the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which he chaired.

Behind the scenes, Kennedy remained a force and had left in place a division of labor for the committee, which his old friend Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) helped to implement. Kennedy could typically work the telephones back to Washington for several hours a day as his energy permitted, and when the bill was finally reported July 15 after a marathon series of markups, he was described as almost giddy, laughing  on the phone.

But Republicans complained that without Kennedy, Democrats were less willing to make the concessions needed for true compromise. As Senate action stalled before the August recess—and the national debate swung wildly at the grassroots level—Kennedy’s absence was felt more sharply.

This was one of the great ironies of the senator’s career. For decades, his liberalism and labor ties made him a butt of ridicule forthe right. Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) first came to Congress literally campaigning against Ted Kennedy liberalism.

But over time, that standing allowed Kennedy to be an agent for compromise, an independent actor with a penchant for deal-making that even annoyed his own party leaders. This was true on education, immigration and health issues in the past decade. No other single Democrat could provide such political cover for others when he opted to move to the center.

Kennedy was helped by his famous name and liberal credentials but also by his roots in an older, more clubby Senate that has virtually disappeared in the less personal, more partisan politics of today’s Washington.

Kennedy was third behind only two other senators in history — the late Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and West Virginia’s Robert Byrd —in the length of his tenure. Byrd, an early rival, rose higher in the leadership, but neither he nor Thurmond matched Kennedy’s legislative output. And Byrd, who grew closer to Kennedy over time, proudly boasts of one title they share: the only two men in U.S. history elected nine times to the Senate.

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