Quote of the Day

So, two Irishmen walk into the Cato Institute...
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“While others talked of free enterprise, it was the Democratic Party that acted and we ended excessive regulation in the airline and trucking industry, and we restored competition to the marketplace, and I take some satisfaction that this deregulation legislation that I sponsored and passed in the Congress of the United States.”

That from Ted Kennedy in his “The Dream Shall Never Die” speech at the 1980 Democratic National Convention that he made just after losing his fight for the party’s nomination. And while the balance of his legislative achievements were between horrid and atrocious, we’ll focus on the positive today because Kennedy was spot-on in that action in the defense of free enterprise in the form of co-sponsoring the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 and being instrumental in the passage as well of the Motor Carrier Act of 1980 were indeed accomplishments of which to be proud.

Baseball Crank had an interesting take on the career of Ted Kennedy and what could be learned from it:

Kennedy at that point could have taken a number of different turns. He could have become a Senate showhorse, making the rounds giving speeches and national TV appearances and doing little real work. He could have become one of Capitol Hill's time-markers, coasting to re-elections while using his office as just a prop for the exhausing, booze-and-flooze nightlife he pursued for so many years. He could have decided that fame and glamor meant he deserved to run for President at the first available opportunity, and stayed far away from any of the real and often controversial work of making laws.

To Kennedy's credit, he did none of those things. He hired the most aggressive, competent staffs on the Hill and immersed himself in the daily business of making laws. Boring bill markups, blathering conferences, wicked hangovers; Kennedy took them all and kept working, working even to the end. He learned how the sausage was made and the deals done, and made quite a lot of it himself. He waited 18 years to run for President, and did so only after compiling an extensive record of actual accomplishment in the Senate.

Kennedy's career could have been a cautionary tale for our current president, who might not have found himself in quite the fix he is in at the moment if he'd followed Ted's example, bided his years, spent more time in the trenches doing the unglamorous work of legislating and taking the hard punches that must be taken to sell the product to the public, learning how the system works, why it works and who makes it work. Most of the changes Ted Kennedy made in this nation over his career were change for the worst - but he did, over time, make real change because he worked at it instead of just saying the word "change" and hoping it would be so.

Ted Kennedy, R.I.P.