Campaign Crawlers
The Kennedys’ Senator
On health care and a host of other issues, Paul Kirk is all in the family.
Michael Dukakis has lost again. The only man in American politics who could make the avuncular George H.W. Bush seem like a decisive political leader and larger-than-life Texan had his eyes on the late Edward M. Kennedy’s Senate seat. But Mr. Dukakis won’t be coming to Washington.
Yesterday Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick announced he was choosing former Democratic National Committee chairman and longtime Kennedy family confidante Paul G. Kirk. Jr. to hold the seat until the Jan. 19 special election. The selection works out well for everyone: the Bay State Democrats currently running in the special election, who don’t have to worry about Kirk deciding to compete with them, the national Democrats who reclaim their 60th Senate vote, and an Obama administration in need of another loyal party apparatchik to rubber stamp its legislative agenda.
Works out well for everyone except former Governor Dukakis, that is. He won’t get to cap a career spent riding in a tank, claiming the Reagan boom as his personal “Massachusetts miracle,” and then watching the state’s bond rating collapse like a house of cards as the economy turned and rendered his chronic overspending impractical. Deval Patrick, who has already done too much to remind Massachusetts voters of why they stopped electing Democratic governors for 16 years after Dukakis left office, wisely decided Senator Dukakis would be a trip down memory lane too far.
Just because Paul Kirk isn’t as familiar a face as the former governor who put “Taxachusetts” on the map doesn’t mean his appointment is a departure from the commonwealth’s political traditions, however. Ted Kennedy is being temporarily replaced by the same process that delivered him his Senate seat in the first place.
Paul Kirk was by all accounts the Kennedy family’s choice to fill the vacancy, just as the Kennedys handpicked a placeholder successor for John F. Kennedy in 1960 to pave the way for Ted’s Senate run when he was constitutionally eligible two years later. As Daniel Flynn recently recounted in TAS, “President-elect Kennedy threatened to allow the incoming Republican governor to make the appointment if the outgoing Democrat didn’t do his bidding.” The result was a temporary Senate seat for JFK’s former Harvard roommate.
Kirk is an appointee along the same lines. He spent eight years working on Ted Kennedy’s staff. He is chairman of the JFK Library Foundation. He was master of ceremonies at an event honoring his predecessor the night before his funeral. “We need a vote and we need someone to do what the senator would have done. This is the most surefire way,” one former Kennedy aide bluntly told the Boston Herald. “(Kirk) would turn to Kennedy’s health-care staffers and say, ‘What do you want to do?’”
No doubt that explains why one of Ted Kennedy’s final public acts was to lobby to restore the governor’s power to make interim appointments to the U.S. Senate. That power was stripped by the state legislature in 2004, when Democrats on Beacon Hill worried that then-Gov. Mitt Romney would appoint a Republican interim senator if John Kerry was elected president. The law was changed five years ago with Kennedy’s blessing. Now that a Democrat is governor, the legislature changed the law back, again with Kennedy’s encouragement.
Governor Patrick admitted last week that President Barack Obama had urged Massachusetts pols to change the law back so the seat wouldn’t be vacant until the special election. Why? He needs a party-line Democrat’s vote on one of Kennedy’s signature issues: expanding the federal government’s role in health care. Obama also hopes that Kirk will turn to the late senator’s health-care staffers and say, “What do you want to do?”
The Massachusetts Republican Party is seeking an injunction against Kirk’s appointment to the Senate seat. The law changing Senate succession rules in the commonwealth doesn’t take effect for 90 days. Governor Patrick had to claim an “emergency” to fill the vacancy now. “This is not an emergency,” a GOP state legislator insisted to the Associated Press. But the odds are such resistance will prove futile.
For the first time in 47 years, Massachusetts is not represented by a senator named Kennedy. But the trend of being represented by Kennedys and Kennedy consiglieres is still going more than a half-century strong. It’s almost enough to make you pine for Senator Michael Dukakis.
About the Author
W. James Antle, III, author of the new book Devouring Freedom: Can Big Government Ever Be Stopped?, is editor of the Daily Caller News Foundation and a senior editor of The American Spectator. You can follow him on Twitter @jimantle.
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drudge ette obama| 9.25.09 @ 6:47AM
As long as Paul Kirk doesn't start a reality tv show in which he channels Teddy Kennedy on the important issues. I grow so weary of Kennedy, dead or alive, I never understood the infatuation. Maybe because my parents mercifully moved our family out of that state in the early 1960s. I guess I didn't drink enough of that Mass. water.
IMKessel| 9.25.09 @ 8:34PM
Mary Jo Kopechne drank your share and then some.
Sorry. Couldn't resist.
BTW, I do enjoy your comments.
Houston Rao| 9.25.09 @ 10:18AM
It must be great to be a legislator when you can make and change laws to suit your personal agendas on any day.
Anthony| 9.25.09 @ 12:32PM
Wherever the hell Saul Alinsky is, the past few days and months have been heaven. His roommate Ted agrees.
Ken (Old Texican)| 9.25.09 @ 2:09PM
Screw 'em! Massachusetts is a lost cause. Locusts and tree huggers.
You Mass. patriots...spend your time and money across State lines.
Ken
Tim| 9.25.09 @ 4:33PM
The New Hampshire State Liquor Store on I-93 is where all the true Massachusetts patriots buy their booze.
Marc Jeric| 9.25.09 @ 6:18PM
The communists will change the law on a moment's notice - well, whatever their fight for "people's rights" require! They have no shame - but then that is the old news. What I do not like about them is that they all are rich - what the French call "communistes de salon".
Margie| 9.25.09 @ 8:09PM
Isn't this the ONLY way the Lib/Socialists continue to "get elected?" Just more of the same. Meanwhile, back at the ranch... why do the Repubs continue to allow this kind of crud? I am so fed up with my State's refusal to back any decent conservative Repubs that I stopped supporting the Party financially. The stupid "moderate" Repubs are ruining the Party.
CopyKatnj| 9.25.09 @ 8:20PM
Where are the citizens of Massachusetts? Why are they not making any noise? Why are they not complaining?
Pingback| 9.25.09 @ 11:21PM
Twitter Trackbacks for The American Spectator : The Kennedys' Senator [spectator.org links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
Grant| 9.26.09 @ 2:23AM
Sen. Kirk, I appeal to you! In a sense, Rosemary was the first martyr: this has to stop now! Teddie and the jokes, did he confide in you as he was supposed to?
Questions for Pres. Obama:
1. What exactly is the issue with releasing your documents, e.g., birth certificate(s), school records, adoption papers, passport records, White House visitors logs, etc.?
2. When you went to school in Indonesia, what was your favorite part of Koranic study?
3. Did you have sex with Frank Marshall Davis when you were an adolescent?
4. Did you matriculate at Occidental as an American citizen?
5. Where did your Columbia University roomie, Sohale Siddiqi, get to? Is he currently in the U.S.?
Does he travel to Pakistan frequently?
6. On which of your passports did you travel to Pakistan in 1981?
7. Have you ever been repatriated?
8. It was just blow, right? You've never smoked crack, right?
9. Even though you pal around with terrorists, you never, personally, killed anyone within the
CONUS? Why was Madelyn Dunham cremated, leaving a prepaid plot next to her beloved Stanley empty?
10. That guy from Duluth, MN, who claims he had sex with you in his limo is telling the truth?
11. ACORN: the ends justify the means, right? (ACORN, founded by an S.D.S. member, trained and represented by B.H. Obama, Esq. (Harvard Law '91), in Chicago, funded by tax dollars, working to establish underage brothels in several cities.)
12. When did you first get involved in child sex rings in Chicago?
13. Who were the guy and the little girl on Air Force One, the only passengers on the Manhattan
fly-by?
14. Were you ever in the same room with Jaime Feliciano, SEIU leader, and a child?
15. Is Valery Jarrett your ACORN bawd? (Or should we ask Bertha Lewis?)
16. Next to being named the most left-wing senator (farther left than Teddie Kennedy, diver and K.G.B. collaborator, R.I.P.), what was your most satisfying moment in your few months as senator?
17. If the LA Times releases the video they have of you at the 2003 party for Rashid Khalidi, your
pal and PLO spokesman, will Jews still vote for you?
Robert Rosencrans| 9.26.09 @ 8:32AM
This proves that capitalists do not always control the means of production.
Robert Rosencrans| 9.26.09 @ 8:32AM
This proves that capitalists do not always control the means of production.
Yosemeti Sam| 9.26.09 @ 11:34AM
Oh, ooh, ah - the seemingly perennial rewards of parochial political inbreeding.
LOL.
Francesco Sinibaldi| 9.26.09 @ 5:11PM
In a symphony.
In the light
of a symphony
there's a charming
intention, and
also that fortune;
there's a little
desire and the
sound of a
beautiful noise....
Francesco Sinibaldi
Wally| 9.28.09 @ 2:04PM
Um, Mr. James. Was Senator Kennedy really for government expansion into healthcare? Or was he actually for expanding the government role in the healthcare INSURANCE system? You know, the one that makes billions by ending your coverage when you get sick. You know, the insurance system that currently is so expensive that 30-40 MILLION people cannot afford it?
And regarding the rule change on appointing Senators. See, this is what happens when you WIN elections; you get to change the rules that don't conflict with the Constitution. And how do you do this "win" thing you might ask? Well, the first step would be try and appeal to Americans besides people who are obsessed with black helicopters who post on this website. The second step would be to try and advocate for something instead of spending time cooking up communist, or is that fascist, accusations against the guy who will be in charge for the next 7 years.
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