THE HOUSTON Chronicle usually pays more attention to Northeastern liberals, dead or alive, than to flesh-and-blood Texans, but today's editorial on Senator Edward Kennedy was an appropriate use of scarce newspaper time and talent.
Back in January, the paper all but canonized Claiborne Pell, D-Rhode Island. Wrote I at the time:
Mr. Pell's true constituents were not the ordinary people of Rhode Island. His true constituents were the national elite -- the latte-drinking, Volvo-driving NPR, PBS crowd; grant-seeking artists and academics, many (most?) contemptuous of America; professors and administrators at Big Education; and, of course, the newspaper editorial bards who sing out, sing free in joyous har-mon-ee about the wonder of it all.
Much the same could be said of Mr. Kennedy, also a trust-fund baby who never had to work for a living in any conventional sense, but who found a career spending other people's money.
By contrast to Mr. Pell, however, Mr. Kennedy deserves an editorial obituary in a Texas newspaper because of his importance in national politics and public policy.
And the Chronicle does an okay job on the Kennedy editorial, in marked contrast to the sloppy wet kiss ("almost magical") it planted on Mr. Pell.
Still -- as always -- one must quibble.
The Chronicle correctly mentions Chappaquiddick and correctly declares that what matters was the death of a young woman, not the wound to Mr. Kennedy's political career.
The editorial also credits Mr. Kennedy with confessing that his "decision to leave the scene of the accident" was "indefensible."
Perhaps he did that. I don't recall.
But what was also indefensible was his long delay in reporting the accident while he sobered up and advisers worked out how to handle the matter to his best political advantage -- a particularly wretched example of what Richard Nixon might have called a modified limited hangout.
Further, saying this event "cost him the presidency" is a stretch. Chappaquiddick cost him an opportunity to be his party's nominee for president (though even that is arguable). Whether he could have gone on, had he gained the nomination, to win the 1980 presidential election is at least an open question about which the Gipper might have had something to say.
The unblinking certitude of the Chronicle's assertion -- "cost him the presidency" -- says much about the newspaper's unexamined, almost royalist notion, of Kennedy family entitlement.
JFK and RFK's brother. President. Sure.
The Chronicle's view that Mr. Kennedy was "all too human in his frailties and appetites" is certainly correct, if somewhat of an understatement. And also a mild slur on the great mass of humans who manage their personal lives with more decorum and simple decency than the Massachusetts senator.
The editorial also puts a silver lining on Mr. Kennedy's "frailties and appetites" that is bizarre.
[Those] same shortcomings also brought him the gifts of compassion and idealism, which the senator brought to his life's work in the Senate on behalf of the lost, last and least.
Somebody needs to 'splain that one to me.
If that proposition were true, the Harris County jail -- filled to the brim with folks blessed with more than their fair share of "frailties and appetites" -- would quite literally be a good place to shop for future political leaders, or at least compassionate and idealistic liberals.
What matters, dear editors, is confession of frailties and appetites, repentance for misconduct inspired by frailties and appetites, and an earnest (and successful) undertaking to cease being guided by frailties and appetites and commence being guided by higher motives. And even that, while appropriate, hardly ensures that the pentitent will be blessed with idealism or compassion.
It would be truer to say, as Nick Anderson does today, that Bad Ted and Good Ted coexisted, not that Bad Ted's badness somehow created, as a gift, Good Ted's goodness.
Finally, saying Mr. Kennedy "almost always" fought his political battles "with . . . a generous spirit" is a major-league fudge. "Almost always" leaves this door open: "except when he didn't."
The shame of Mr. Kennedy's hateful slander of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork -- to offer just one example -- is that he was not ashamed of what he did, nor are his admirers.
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