Who Else You Got?

The Democratic and Republican candidates for U.S. senator from California both make devastatingly effective cases, so I've made up my mind. The LA Times:

Asked if, after her three terms in the Senate, it was time to give someone else a turn, [Barbara] Boxer said voters would decide whether to give her another shot "or elect someone who made her name as CEO of Hewlett-Packard, laying thousands and thousands of workers off, shipping jobs overseas, making no sacrifice while she was doing it and taking $100 million. I don't think we need those Wall Street values right now."

[Carly] Fiorina, in turn, portrayed Boxer as an ineffective Washington relic who had lost touch with the concerns of Californians and whose liberal ideology has led to higher taxes and more regulation for the state's residents and businesses.

"She is for more taxes, she is for more spending, she is for more regulation, she is also for big government and elite extreme environmental groups," said Fiorina, who said her rival had accomplished little in the Senate because she is "one of the most bitterly partisan members."

Richard Vs. Richard

Stunning those who counted John McCain out a few months ago, GOP conservatives failed to deprive him of another term in the U.S. Senate. Once he'd scrambled to the right (and collected, it must be said, Sarah Palin's endorsement), he sailed in for an easy win in yesterday's primary against talk show host and former congressman J.D. Hayworth, who proved to be a weak cup of tea.

Ageless right-wing guru Richard Viguerie is now harrumphing and reminding McCain how much he's in debt to those who wanted so desperately to end his distinguished career. As Richard Nixon would say, and would be writing his old POW friend today in his longhand scrawl, he owes them nothing. I bet McCain starts tacking to the center again the day after tomorrow and spends what will probably be his last six years in Congress as Mr. Neo-Maverick out of sheer, joyful spite.

Young Man Blues

George Will turns a nice phrase about Sen. Kennedy:

In the Senate, as elsewhere, 80 percent of the important work is done by a talented 20 percent. And 95 percent of the work is done off the floor, away from committees, out of sight, where strong convictions leavened by good humor are the currency of accomplishment. There Ted Kennedy, who had the politics of the Boston Irish in his chromosomes, flourished.

Since I read newspapers on-line (and on-Kindle, where I proudly pay for content), I rarely see the marvelous way great papers still express themselves in page layout and headlines. Here in a Starbucks in San Diego, I caught a glimpse of a grandiloquent banner headline in the New York Times: "Senator Kennedy, Battle Lost, Is Hailed as a Leader."

I wonder who wrote that: A baby boomer authentically mourning the end of an era, or a younger editor who had gotten himself or herself into the spirit of the moment. While the "battle lost" bit is elevating, it's a battle many of us will join as well. I'm in San Diego to conduct a committal service for a less-well-known man who battled cancer no less bravely, as millions do and shall. So perhaps that element could have been skipped, at least in the headline.

As for Kennedy as a great leader, all notable people should be given their due in the wake of their deaths, as the Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby does. But Jacoby's summary of Kennedy's foreign policy legacy is startling:

Abroad, he failed to take seriously the stakes in the Cold War. “Today, with the exception of East Germany, Russia has no more satellites,’’ he wrote in 1968, the year Soviet tanks invaded Czechoslovakia. He hailed Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet dictator, as “a warm individual . . . completely committed to peace.’’ He fought to cut off aid to South Vietnam and Cambodia in 1975 - aid that might have prevented a communist bloodbath. In recent years he was willing to consign millions to Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, opposing not only the 2003 liberation of Iraq but even the 1991 campaign to undo the occupation of Kuwait.

On domestic affairs, Kennedy used most of his influence promoting ways to spend other people's money. While Kennedy has been hailed this week for his courage, in politics, being a big spender is courageous only to the extent of sometimes exposing one to being voted out of office, which would have caused no meals to be missed in Kennedy's household.

As for the issue with which he is most closely associated, in 1971 he missed a chance to provide health insurance to virtually all Americans when he opposed President Nixon's national health insurance plan. His subsequent efforts amounted to de facto acts of expiation for failing as a young man to exhibit the bipartisan temperament for which he being so fulsomely if selectively praised today. The thing is, 38 years ago, he actually could've pulled it off. So whose fault is it that 43 million Americans remain uninsured?