Out with the new and in with the old: Coakley's choke costs Dems filibuster proof super-majority

For more than 46 years, Edward M. "Ted" Kennedy, one of the greatest legislators in American history, held the Senate seat in Massachusetts. Before him, his brother, President John F. Kennedy, held the seat for seven years. Combined, the Kennedy family held the seat for more than 50 years and helped shape the lives of millions of Americans, both in Massachusetts and nationally, through their history making legislation on such issues as civil rights, women's rights and health care. Now, the legacy of the Kennedy's is all but an afterthought, following the political hack, Martha Coakley's, loss to former nude male model, Republican Scott Brown.

If you don't already know, Brown defeated Coakley yesterday in a special election for Kennedy's seat. The blame game had already begun by Democrats prior to polls closing in the state as each party tried to point the finger at one another for the historic loss. While issues like health care, jobs and even the continuation of the war in Afghanistan can all be attributed to the Democrats embarrassing defeat at the hands of a virtual unknown, it is not hard to figure out why Martha Coakley lost the seat and Brown won: She ran a pathetic, virtually non-existent campaign, while Brown ran as good a campaign as one can run. It's really that simple. And while some Independent voters might have been trying to send President Obama a message, I think the vote had more to do with state politics than the state of the nation.

While I believe this to be true, many analysts throughout the country are trying to point the finger at health care for the devastating loss that will now most likely kill the health care bill once and for all. If so, Obama will be the seventh president since FDR, not to mention Richard Nixon also tried proposing a universal health care bill in 1974, to try and pass a universal health care bill. I wonder though, how can this election have anything to do with heath care when Massachusetts is the only state in the country that basically has universal health coverage already in place - with 97 percent of people covered under their popular health care bill that was sponsored by Sen. Kennedy. So I have a hard time buying the fact that health care was the driving reason behind Brown's victory - whether the Republicans want to spin it like that is a different story, but I can't see a state that has a health care system in place much like the one currently proposed in Congress would vote against a candidate strictly on that issue.

Obama currently sits at a 48 percent approval rating, with only 39 percent of people saying they would vote for him for reelection right now (of course that is not taking into consideration who his Republican opponent will be, and at this point the GOP still has no one to match his charisma). Sure people are upset. They were promised hope and change like no other presidential candidate had promised before, but of course I guess most of these people didn't bother listening to the substance behind Obama's soaring speeches and articulate rhetoric, because if they did, they would find he is doing everything he said he was going to do during the election. This is the change Obama sold to us all last year and I guess now people are having buyer’s remorse.

Not only that, but he is tackling some of the biggest challenges in our nation's history, having to combat two wars, terrorism, health care, and a failing economy, all of which was created thanks to the Republicans, who the voters of Massachusetts just put back in power. I think most of us on the left understand the challenges the president is facing, and the decisions he is making, while those on the right will never like it, and people in the middle will continue to dominate the outcome of these elections as they flip flop between candidates like John McCain did on the issues during the 2008 elections.

What I am fearful of right now is that people don't really know how to vote. They know jobs are being lost and the economy, while stable, is still not showing the turnaround we would all like to see. They now all of a sudden are beginning to question our presence in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan after almost a decade of fighting in both places. And they are frightened that health care for all is a bad thing, just like their parents, grandparents and great grandparents believed when FDR first proposed such a system.

But the biggest problem with their current view of the Obama administration and Democrats is that they believe they can vote away all of their problems by putting the same party back in power that put this country in this situation in the first place. I knew Americans had short memory's, but I didn't know it took only a year for them to turn their backs on the party they elected to fix the country, in order to put back in power the morons who ruined it in the first place - plus can anyone name one idea Republicans have come up with to fix our problems in the past year? Anyone? Cause I sure as hell can’t. They have spent all of their time trying to obstruct “change,” instead of trying to create their own.

To show you just how some of these voters are thinking, yesterday, CNN was playing messages from callers concerning who and why they were voting for a specific candidate in the election. One caller said he was unhappy with the money the country was wasting on the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, so he wanted to send a clear message to Obama. I guess this character forgot that it was the Republicans who got us into these two wars in the first place and it is the Republicans who would vote to leave us there for another 100 years if given the chance. Like this caller, some of the reasoning behind these people voting for Brown makes absolutely no sense. I just don't get how the Republicans and Bush get eight years to fuck this country up and these same voters won't give Obama more than a year to have his agenda come together and get us back on track. I guess it just proves how ignorant we are as voters and that is why I feel our failure is inevitable - we were promised change, our president is working toward change, and then we stop it all dead in its tracks because we are not happy with how long the change is taking.

Admittedly, Coakley was a fool, who did not find it necessary to get out and pound the pavement in order to win the seat and that is why she inevitably lost – and deservingly so. Kennedy even after four decades in the Senate, always continued to pound the pavement, even pulling up to cars with bumper stickers reading his name to further talk with them about the issues and let them know he cared about them as an individual voter. However, if this is a referendum on where the country is going then why did it take Americans almost six years before they voted out the Republicans in Congress and eight years before they voted out President Bush, while many of the same issues they bitch about today were all coming to a head.

I guess some of these people just think Washington is out of control. And to that I say, yes, it is out of control, if you consider bailouts that stopped the cataclysmic failure of our economy, health care that would offer affordable insurance to the more than 40 million Americans currently living without it and the end to the war in Iraq and a strategy to get out troops out of Afghanistan in a responsible way. If you consider all of these things out of control, then yes, the Obama administration is out of control and I am proud to support it.

They say the people who voted for Brown are now trying to target Obama with this reverse idea of "change." Well nothing has changed, so I guess they just want to go back to the same old idiots who ran this country for the last eight years. If they wanted real change, if they really wanted to send a message they would have voted for Independent candidate Joe Kennedy (no relation to Ted Kennedy). Now that would have sent a real message to Washington.

What this means for health care and Democrats moving forward.

So I guess now you ask what this means for health care and more importantly the Obama agenda. Well, it’s not good. The Democrats finally had the votes in both the Senate and House to pass a bill that FDR, Truman, Nixon and Clinton all failed to pass. History and health for all Americans was in the making, but now the Democrats have to go back to the drawing board if they intend to get anything passed. They do, however, have a few options.

The first is to just try to ram the Senate bill through the House and bring it to a vote before Brown is seated. This appears to be the Democrats best bet, however, it is greatly feared that it will upset the public even more for pushing through this back room deal. Plus, the Senate health bill as it stands, is more of a present for insurance companies than it is working people, so in the end I guess we have to ask, “is any bill better than no bill at all?”

The second option is asking the Senate to accept provisions to their bill as a condition for House passage. However, this is very complicated and would force Senate Democrats to seek a procedure called reconciliation to pass the bill with 51 vote - the fillibuster, the dumbest procedure in politics, allows a party to debate an issue for as long as they would like unless 60 of the 100 Senators vote to move forward. This is why the Democrats super-majority was so important to their agenda.

The third option would be to convince a more liberal, Republican like Olympia Snow of Main to support the bill. While this could be difficult considering she voted against the current Senate bill, Obama has continued to stay in contact with Snow about the possibility.

The fourth option is for Democrats to water down the bill and try to pass whatever they can. This, however, could be tough due to a number of Democratic Congressman and Senators threatening to vote against any bill that does not have specific provisions they had previously voted for.

Of course then there is always the option of just putting the bill up for a vote and forcing politicians from both sides of the isle to vote against it. This is my favorite option. If politicians want to deny people health care coverage because it fails to meet their own standards, then let them do it, and let them explain to their voters why they don't have health insurance in the next election.

In the end, it is a sad day for all Democrats and individuals looking for real health reform. Sen. Kennedy spent most of his life fighting for such a bill and it's just sad now that his vote will be used to kill it - and in turn will lead to the deaths of more than 40,000 Americans this year alone. But I guess that is just something we will have to live with, because while we all throw our money toward the earthquake victims of Haiti, and justifiably so, we are more concerned about the money our nation will spend on such a bill than we are the lives that will be lost in denying health care for all.

The Last Lion: Kennedy dies at 77

The last lion is dead. And I am not talking about the feline. I am talking about the man, Sen. Ted Kennedy, whose finger prints can be found on most every major piece of legislation in the United States for the last 40 years. Whether it was civil rights, health care, education, labor, poverty, immigration or an array of other issues that bind us all, Kennedy has left an imprint on all of our lives, rich or poor, black or white, educated or uneducated, that none of us can deny.

Born in 1932, Edward M. Kennedy was the youngest of nine children in a prominent Irish-American family living in Boston, MA. For much of his early life, Kennedy was shadowed by his two older brothers, John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy, but in time he would surpass them both as politicians by passing more than 300 laws and writing more than 2,500 bills in his 46 years in congress.

However, prior to his success, Kennedy was a rising star in the Democratic Party in 1969, until a tragic accident marred any chances of him ever becoming president. In July, after leaving a banquet on Chappaquiddick Island, Kennedy drove his car off a bridge. He would survive the accident but 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne would not. Following the crash, Kennedy failed to alert the authorities - saturating him in controversy - and angering Republicans who felt he got away with murder. Kennedy would eventually plead guilty to leaving the scene of an accident.

To Kennedy's credit, he did not run from the anger directed at him over the incident, but rather he took it head on, speaking openly on national television about his mishaps concerning the accident and asking the Massachusetts electorate whether or not he should stay in office - receiving a favorable response. A few weeks later he would be forgiven by Kopechne's mother and in 1970 won the support of his state by winning reelection. For Kennedy, it was just another tragedy in a life that had already seen the death of his sister, nephew, three brothers and his own near death experience after a plane crash left him with a broken back.

After being given a second chance, Kennedy did not step back into the shadows of embarrassment like most would have, but rather he rose above his mishap to pass some of the most important legislation in American history, including the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the National Cancer Act of 1971, the Federal Election Campaign Act Amendments of 1974, the COBRA Act of 1985, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, the Ryan White AIDS Care Act in 1990, the Civil Rights Act of 1991, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, the Mental Health Parity Act in 1996 and 2008 and the State Children's Health Insurance Program in 1997. He also became one of the most important and well respected leaders in the United State Senate, due in part to his ability to bring Republicans and Democrats together, not to mention his intense work ethic and his expertise as a legislator. After all of Kennedy's mishaps during his early life, he grew as a person and changed into a man that turned tragedy into prominence.

But what might have been Kennedy's most important trait was his curiosity and compassion for his fellow man.

He came from privilege although you would have never known it by the way he fought for working class folk and those stricken by poverty. He saw no room for discrimination and spent much of his life fighting for others civil liberties that even included being one of the first advocates for gay rights, not to mention being instrumental in eliminating segregation in America. In many ways, the America we live in today is as much a product of Ted Kennedy as it is any other legislator in American history. He has instituted the laws that all of us hold so dearly to our hearts, because they are the ones that guarantee our freedoms, while other politicians are attempting to take them away in the face of their own political gain.

In the 21st century he continued his legacy by voting against the invasion of Iraq, which he called the "best vote" he ever cast. He fought for universal health care, which became the driving force in his political life, claiming health care as a right and not a privilege. And in a time of fleeting hope, he passed the torch onto a new leader, Barack Obama, who he believed embodied the Kennedy ideology that America could always do better. In many ways he was a voice for the voiceless in America.

While Kennedy's life has been marred by as much scandal as it has praise, and with good reason, in the end there is no doubt that Edward M. Kennedy is an American Hero, who took the ideology of his family and turned it into a lasting legacy that his brothers never lived long enough to complete. While Joseph, John and Bobby's faces now live in our minds as nothing more than still life's in a distant time. Teddy's legacy and the laws that he instituted will continue to touch our lives until the end of time.

"The work begins anew. The hope rises again. And the dream lives on." Sen. Ted Kennedy (1932-2009)