Josh Marshall raises the elephant in the room: that timing and circumstance of Ted Kennedy’s death, and indeed the events of the last year of his life, make it impossible to separate from the politics of the moment.
It’s difficult to miss the almost novelistic way in which the progress of Kennedy’s illness has woven itself in and out of the politics of the last two years. His illness was diagnosed not long after his critical endorsement of Obama in advance of Super Tuesday. And he roused himself to appear at Obama’s nominating convention. His death now comes at the end of what for Democrats has been the cruelest month, six weeks of vitriol and antics which have not only depressed the president’s poll numbers and demoralized many of his supporters but achieved what can only be considered the remarkable feat of entirely sidelining discussion of the chronic insecurity of health insurance coverage for millions of Americans and refocusing it on euthanasia, xenophobia, anti-government paranoia and a sea of misinformation which would be comic if it were not for the seriousness of the underlying issue.
The question I’m asking myself is whether Kennedy’s death will [move] the national political conversation … to something approaching reality and refocusing it on the actual question before the country. Similarly, will it galvanize Democrats? That really is the question.
There’s nothing about Kennedy’s death, that of a man well advanced in years, somber and painful as it is, that should make anyone who disagreed with his policy positions on health care vote for a bill that embodied them. But among the wash of conventional Democrats, sloshing amidst political calculation, the profusion of technical questions and the atmospherics of the moment, will Kennedy’s death serve to arrest thinking for a spell, focus people on the finite quantity of life and the fleeting windows of political opportunity to provide a coalescence, a pivot point toward a conclusion more in line with what Kennedy hoped would be his legacy.
I can’t help but feel, at long last, after all the lies and the hatred, that a man’s death will serve as a turning point, at least among Democrats and the one of two Republican Senators that still have a soul.