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 Editorials | Opinions 
Passionate Opposition
 Eleanor Clift - Newsweek
Despite another loss in 2004, progressive Democrats like Ted Kennedy remain optimistic, as the GOP fractures over Social Security reform and President Bush's ambitious domestic agenda.
 Sitting down to breakfast Thursday morning with reporters, Sen. Ted Kennedy pushed away the plate with eggs, bacon and sausage, stealing only a few bites as he talked. He brought charts to illustrate his new progressive proposals on education and Medicare, and when a reporter asked if he was "in denial" over the Democrats losing another congressional election, Kennedy said, "Cruel analysis," and laughed.
"We're not talking about 1994," he said. Back then, Democrats were so disheartened at losing the House and Senate that party donors pulled back. Kennedy recalled spending six hours at a fund-raiser in Miami and raising only $1,600. The dynamics are completely different this time, he said. When he attended his sister Rosemary's funeral in Wisconsin earlier this month, two nuns told him about an event outside Madison where 1,100 grass-roots activists gathered on behalf of the progressive agenda.
"You have a disaster of unimaginable proportions going on in Iraq and you have a quivering dollar" that our creditors in China could send into a nosedive, Kennedy said. It's a political hand that should test any politician. Topping it off, President George W. Bush is going to Congress with an agenda he only touched upon in the election. "I didn't hear a lot about capturing the courts," Kennedy said, referring to Bush's push to get through conservative judges that the Democrats blocked in his first term. The election wasn't about privatizing Social Security either, said Kennedy.
A Pew Research Center poll shows that Bush begins his second term considerably less popular than other recent second-term presidents and that his domestic agenda is at odds with the public's priorities. Americans want health care addressed, and while they're open to the idea of private investment accounts for Social Security, they think it's more important to preserve the guaranteed monthly benefit that is the core of the system.
As the Senate becomes the battleground for the next two years, Kennedy's message is to his fellow Democrats: The Republicans don't have a vast mandate however much Bush wants to claim it. Bush's ambitious domestic agenda won't go anywhere unless he gets around the Senate. And that's where Kennedy looms in the sunset of his career and at the peak of his legislative influence. "When it comes to standing up to conservatives and standing up to Bush, it's Kennedy and it's Hillary," says Norman Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. "They're both icons of the party." Kennedy also has 42 years in the Senate and showed a long time ago that this was not a patronage position born out of nepotism, says Ornstein. "He has become a giant of the Senate. Any list of the top 10 senators of the 20th century, he would be on it."
Asked to speculate on Bush's motivation in pushing private investment accounts for Social Security despite the political peril, Kennedy reminds reporters that Republicans opposed social welfare plans such as Social Security when they first passed and still do, he said. "I don't think it's a mystery," said Kennedy. "It's ideological."
With Social Security reform shaping up to be the defining battle, forget about the Democrats. In the Republican Party you've got one faction saying no tax increases, another saying no benefit cuts, a third saying any transition to private accounts has to be paid for and a fourth saying let's call the whole thing off, it's too hard. "Not only does he have to worry about a foreign-policy quagmire but a domestic one, as well," says Marshall Wittmann, a policy analyst at the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. Almost every day some Republican raises his or her head above the parapet to take on Bush's policies. U.S. Chamber of Commerce president Tom Donahue, usually a reliable cheerleader for the White House, says tax reform is a steep hill he'd rather not climb, and he's noncommittal on overhauling Social Security. Bill Kristol, one of the GOP's preeminent thinkers, likens Bush's approach on Social Security to the Clinton overreach on health care, which paralyzed the White House for 20 long months.
On the eve of the Inauguration, Democrats are far more united than the Republicans, despite the GOP's showy display of victory. Not all wings of the party would call Iraq Bush's Vietnam, as Kennedy does. But Kennedy's passion for opposing Bush reflects what Democrats feel whether they're right, left or center. Asked if he would be attending the Inauguration, Kennedy replied, "To see if he waves at me?" Then he smiled mischievously. "I used to be an old friend," he said, recalling how Bush once courted him. Bush will need lots of new friends to pull off his domestic agenda. |
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