That Kennedy Legacy
The end of Ted Kennedy's long sojourn among us, splendidly splashed by the media, opened the renewed discussion of whether it's time that big government, in the Kennedy mode, came back.
The late senator's eulogists—in politics and the media, not to mention at the funeral—tended to nod their heads enthusiastically. We needed the big ideas and projects of the senator's legacy for the sake of justice and the future. It was time to get wealth controlled, poverty vanquished and health care extended to all. The latter we had to do (so West Virginia's Sen. Robert Byrd assured us) as a memorial to the senator, who made universal health care the cause of causes.
Anyone in the mood for big, costly government is entitled under the First Amendment to talk it up, but they shouldn't expect automatic rallying around just on account of Ted Kennedy's election to another realm of existence. For that to happen, we'd have to conclude that big government, in the style laid out for our enthusiastic inspection of the Obama administration, has something to do with solving problems.
In the general understanding, big doesn't always mean better. It means big. Big, in turn, can mean various things: costly, expensive, gaudy, efficient or powerful. That last one—powerful—is the attribute on which we might focus. How much power do we mean to concede to government, so that it might be beneficial?
The political motif from the Reagan years—running really through the '90s ("The era of big government is over," says W. J. Clinton)—was that government was as much hindrance as help. Often enough, government was less help than bother and mess. The Obama supporters want to wrench that formulation around: Make us see government as an undisguised blessing. Is it, though? It depends on what you want government to do. Fight wars? Yes. Regulate interstate commerce? Yes, mostly. Administer justice and contribute to the relief of misery? Yes, yes. Make and sell automobiles. No! No!
Now we work into another mode. Shall government equalize incomes? No! Define meticulously how business may operate? No! Control access to health care? Never! The Declaration of Independence breathes distrust of government. It's in our DNA.
Americans don't hate government, unless I've missed something. They desire that government should keep its voice down, wipe its shoes and control its diet. This is for substantial reasons. First, big government costs more than we can afford—$9 trillion is now the projected size of the Obama deficit, assuming voters stand by and let Congress enact the full, current Obama agenda. Second, he who pays the piper calls the tune. Big government begins by promising the good life and ends by defining that life. Is there anyone who hasn't heard Lord Acton on the subject? Power tends to corrupt, and … you know the rest.
The debate over Ted Kennedy's legacy, with Kennedy's fine stentorian voice silenced, may be brief. Kennedy made the exercise of government power sound to many like a function of civic duty. "Liberty" wasn't the senator's favorite word. You never heard him suggest there was danger in government oversight of our lives. You never heard John F. Kennedy, a moderate Democrat, suggest it either, and certainly not the old buccaneer Joseph P. Kennedy, father of the tribe. The "liberal lion," who was Ted Kennedy, roared proudly enough, but the generality of Americans don't like lying down with lions, lest one morning they fail to wake up.
Government in the United States is bigger today than a century ago, bigger than during Reagan's presidency, and likely to become larger. Its growth in America comes in fits and starts, as well as in proportion to the growth of the population and the economy. The love of government, though, for its own sake—faith in government's purposes and methods—no lion can sell that stuff. When Americans think of government, they imagine a different beast entirely: large and lumbering, slow-witted and occasionally vengeful. The elephant—naturally.
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"Is there anyone who hasn’t heard Lord Acton on the subject?"
Yes, the vast majority of the American public.
Most Americans had heard enough about this so-called "lion" the first time he was called that. The "lion" was about as real as Camelot. Nice piece of PR, though. I suppose if you look physically big enough, are loud, and have a shock of grey hair you can get away with it -- yawn -- the fact is most Americans cared little enough about Teddy Kennedy to bother disputing this well-orchestrated late life hype. A wish a real journalist could track down the bill for that service. But even the hapless JFK Jr. generated significantly more real life fire in the starry-eyed diehards than Teddy (Jr. even merited an "eternal flame" in the midwestern country town just south of my city ... no Teddy flames yet reported, though).
I don't find that even Democrats beleve an iota of the lion's publicly professed creed of big government as a charitable foundation. Oh sure, they will mouth it -- they have to say something. Republicans get away with their big government love affair by just outright lying the opposite. On both sides, the real game is power and most people know it. That was all the Obama vote was about for its own diehard crew -- too new on the block nationally to be properly identified before November. The vote was also however a rejection of that sort of Republican big government love affair that had been around long enough to finally be recognized.
Murchison is entirely correct -- no lion can sell that stuff, nor even an aging war hero. The name of the game is stealth, deception, and spin in all spheres. Unfortunately, something in the American gene is terribly open to that, as demonstrated by our major writers such as Melville & Twain well over a century ago. Of course, they aren't taught anymore.
We the people lurch along like a giant hamster, only finally failing to push the wrong lever after repeated electric shocks, duly verified as shocks by those spin doctors called "news reporters." The good news is that post-JFK, 3 (count 'em) big government P.T. Barnums from Massachusetts, including the lion himself, have been rejected for the presidency. The bad news is that the hamster seems to think that place of origin, age vs. youth, race & gender have something to do with the solution it rejects. Unfortunately the easily deluded hamster -- whatever its instincts as Murchison I think properly reads them -- behaves, objectively speaking, despite all its fine feeling about itself, exactly as Murchison's elephant.
The author makes the same arguments that were made prior to 1861. Where did that get them...and us?
With all due respect to the dead, Senator Kennedy looked less like a lion at the end than like a tired toad. Not that he resembled a lion at any other time, mind you ...
By the way, Scott Richert has a well-written piece contrasting Eunice Kennedy Shriver with her younger brother Ted over at about.com.
How strange are fading memories. Here I was, imagining that Bill Clinton left office with red figures and budget deficits barely on speaking terms when next thing you know it, what ever you want it to be so long as you are able to pay taxes, is all the fault of one or other of those terrible Kennedy boys.