Is the Senate the Summit of Teddy Kennedy's ambitions?

It's a state convention of trade unionists in Massachusetts. The keynote speaker is Senator Edward Kennedy. He leaps to the rostrum and delivers a rousing populist oration, not at all in the idiom of these conservative times. He concludes with an impassioned plea for the cause he has made his own: national health insurance.

"They passed national health innsurance in Canada. And do you know what happened? The doctors said they would go on strike. And do you know what happened? The doctors did go on strike. And do you know what happenned? The death rate went do wn !" There's a great roar of laughter as America's leading liberal tells the labour moveement what it wants to hear, and all too seldom hears from the man in the White House.

It's hours after the adjournment of the 95th Congress, at the end of Octoober. In two days the elected represenntatives of the American people have passed more regressive legislation than in any session since the infamous Eightieth Congress which beat down national health insurance and full employment bills after the Second World War. The tax bill is rigged to give most of the boodle to citizens earning over 200,000 dollars a year. The bill deregulating the price of natural gas will most sharply penalise the poor. Senator after senator races to the right, convinced by polling data just before the November elections that such is his only chance of salvation at the polls.

When the carnage is over, Teddy Kennedy uplifts his voice in denunciaation of what he calls the worst situaation "inmy sixteen years in the Senate". Both he and the other leading senate liberal, C;eorge Mct iovern , execrate the hand-outs to corporations. the flight from the spirit of the New Deal. Their voices are strong. but lonely. The New Deal, or anything remotely resembling it, is not in fashion this year.

They used to call the late Hubert Humphrey "the soul of the Democratic Party". A journalist asked Teddy Kennedy the other day whether he felt that "the mantle" of Humphrey had now fallen on his shoudlers. The senator shrugged and then smiled. "So many mantles," he finally replied. But he knew just as well as the journalist that the mantle in question - spokesman for the poor, the minorities, labour. the ghetto population of the big cities - has surely been passed to him, at the ripe young age of 46, and that a very large number of Democrats would like to See him become President in 1980.

There are statesmen in many politiical parties who may embody fine asspiratio ns and noble traditions, but who are, as they say, on the shelf and leaders lost forever. Teddy Kennedy is not in this position. Not less than 49 per cent of Democratic voters in one recent poll stated that they wished Kennedy would be at the head of the ticket two years from today. 34 per cent favoured Carter.

Kennedy is the most popular politician in the Democratic Party, in permanent request for functions such as the one described above in Massaachussetts. He criss-crosses the country in support elf politicians, amassing political debts. forging new alliances. Journalists well seaso ned in the sport once again clamber into the press busses and send "Is Teddy Running?" articles hack to their editors.

The Kennedy magic that wor k s on these journalists and those audiences is nothing 'partk-ularly mysterious Writer, do not search for adjectives with the same care or confusion as they did with his brother Bobby. Teddy is of course inheritor of the family's tradition and mystique , but he is also so met h ing very simple: an emphatic liberal in a party led by a man who has just raised interest rates and in clined his knee before the altar of the balanced budget It was George Meany, head of the AFL-CIO, who said the other day that Carter "is the most conservative president in my lifetime". Meany was born in the last century, so he has plenty of comparaative material.

Meany, a conservative labour leader, would like to see Kennedy in the White House. John Conyers, a radical black Congressman from Detroit, would like to see Kennedy in the White House. And when the recession in the economy sets in next year - as it surely will after Carter's Republican-style economic proogram of early November - there will be millions more with the same emotion.

So just how likely is it?

As a simple point of information, we should note that Kennedy has never declared that he seeks the nomination of his party in 1980. Sure enough, he teases audiences with the idea. "I exxpect you're wondering why I'm here," he grinned at a state Democratic connvention in New Hampshire (venue of the first primary in any presidential cammpaign) the a ther day. The crowd laughhed, but they were also wondering.

He flirts with the notion and skirts commitment. It's something as simple as keeping one's options open and of course keeping oneself in the public eye. It's a flirtation with imponderables, too. If Carter's popularity wanes ... or if it soars ... then Kennedy will accelerate or decelerate his activity as leader of the loyal Democratic opposition.

There are some very concrete reasons right now why Teddy Kennedy is certainly not offended at the thought that many wish him to be the candidate. When the Congress reconvenes after the New Year he will be the new chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, a post of great power and one until now inhabited by conservative southerner James Eastland, who has retired. Kennedy will be one of the most powerrful men on Capitol Hill. His committee confirms federal judges, considers antiitrust legislation, could hold hearings on gun control - to name three specific and important areas.

The more potent his reputation as a national figure, the more effective his sway in the Senate and his purchase on the executive branch and the President himself. As Jack Newfield, a friend of Teddy and author of an excellent book on Bobby, puts it: "He toys with runnning against Carter to get leverage." He adds, having recently spent a day with Kennedy, "He's looking relaxed and at peace with himself. He's looking forward to being chairman of JUdiciary. Unless Carter collapsed I don't think he would run. If he never became presiident, but succeeded with anti-trust laws, national health and gun control he could feel he had accomplished his mission. "

Just after asking whether he is runnning or not, journalists ask - though in decreasing numbers - about the Chappaaquiddick factor. Just how haunting is the shade of Mary Jo Kopechne? A poll this year in Time magazine proclaimed that over 70 per cent of Democratic voters said that Chappaq uidd ick wo uld not influence their decision in voting for Kennedy. Now if Kennedy were actuallly to run, the articles and investigations

would start again, just as they did in 1976. And as in 1976 there would be some ongoing contradictions and dubieeties in his recollection of what happened in 1969. There always will be.

Earlier this year, in an interview in McCalls magazine, his wife Joan recounnted her successful fight against alcohollism, her occasional loneliness and her sense of hurt when she read stories of her husband's adventures, imagined or otherwise, with other women. The story provoked the general conclusion that the Senator and his wife are leading more or less separate lives - she in

Boston and he in Washington. Cynics quickly suggested that the interview laid Iowa potential problem in 1980 by exposing it in 1978. This reasoning is a little byzantine - but may end up being true anyway.

With the fading, though possibly still worrysorne matters of Chappaquiddick and his marriage presently not afflicting the minds of voters, what are Kennedy's most convincing assets? Over the years in the Senate, which he entered at the age of 30, Kennedy has steadily gained the reputation (not always held by

liberals in that body) of being an effecctive legislator. He successfully argued before the Supreme Court against the presidential use of the pocket veto Nixon's tactic for knocking down disstasteful bills. He was instrumental in eliminating the poll tax and in inauguurating the 18-year old vote. He does his homework and has always assembled an efficient staff.

Most of all, of course, he has fought over the years for national health innsurance, probably the single issue with which he is most identified in the minds of the voters. His most open disagreeement with President Carter came this year over health insurance and Carter's sabotage of it as "inflationary." As a matter of fact, Kennedy has made his own compromises here, to a level where he has been charged by some critics from the left as having sold the bill out to the private insurance industry. But such details do not affect the reputation he has won as the politician most conncerned with the health of the poor and the old.

"Sure he could have it," a friend said to me apropos Kennedy's possible canndidacy. "But what would he do with it?" The point here is that Kennedy is a prominent liberal in a time when the country has moved to the right, or at least (if you dislike ascription of such general motions to "a country") when politicians elected to the senate are more right-wing and when programs of social spending and so forth are under serious fire.

The dream is of course that Kennedy would single-handedly reverse this tide. The actuality is that Kennedy would either bend before the forces that have made Carter into a Republican president or be forced to forge an alliance of left-liberals-Iabour-b lacks. The construcction of such an alliance would be a tumultous and almost impossible task - and one which Kennedy, beyond present invocations of the putative alliance, might be unwilling to undertake. It would be a high risk and danngerous operation. He can win important victories now, or at least help them occur. Against the trend in the mid-term elections at the start of November, a young liberal called Paul Tsongas beat Edward Brooke in a Senate race in Massachussetts, Brooke was the only black in the Senate and Kennedy had often tacitly supported him in the past. This time, amid personal scandals surrounding Brooke, Kennedy campaiggned for Tsongas.

Jack Kennedy's presidential career was shattered by Oswald before the reckoning of his administration could properly be made. Bobby died on the edge of possible achievements which will never be known. Teddy has grown steadily from the student who cheated in his exams, to the senator who stutterred out the miserable excuses for Chappaq uiddick to a major politician who represents the better instincts of his party: better, but presently unnpopular and indeed almost abandoned. The scenarios can always be drawn:

Jerry Brown as the front-runner in 1980, with Kennedy coming in at Convention time to unite the party, and restore these better instincts and its soul. History will probably not be so accommodating. Absent a war or a major slump, Carter can outman oeuvre the liberal opposition and prevail. The continuity of Teddy's career - and he is a smart politician - would seem to point towards long-term survival in the Senate .•

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