Goodbye To The Kennedys, Hello President Palin

By Doug Draper

How does the ring of ‘President Sarah Palin’ sound to you?

Yes I know. Some of you might actually like the sound of that. I mean to the extent to which there is apparently one hell of a lot of people across our binational region tuning in to Rush Limbaugh – his assaults on virtually anything Barack Obama has to say or do are blasting across the airwaves, courtesy of WBEN Radio in Buffalo, almost every day – who wish Palin was president now.

This hearse carrying the remains of Senator Ted Kennedy in Cape Cod, Massachusetts last August may have spelled the end of Kennedy-style progressive liberalism in North America. Photo by Doug Draper

I was mainly putting that opening question to all of you out who may think that the idea of Sarah Palin standing on the steps of the U.S. Capital building in January of 2012 – just as Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy did in times gone by – with a hand on a Bible, taking the oath of office for the presidency of the United States is impossible.

Impossible? If you had told me, even two months ago, that a virtually unknown Republican candidate by the name of Scott Brown, who is opposed to publicly funded health care, regulating Wall Street and the banks, etc., etc., would win a senate seat in one of the most liberal of U.S. states, Massachusetts, held by John Kennedy and his younger brother, the recently deceased Senator Ted Kennedy, for more than 50 years, I might have said that was impossible.

But it happened this Jan 19 – just one day before the first anniversary of President Obama’s inauguration – and it may signal the beginning of the end, not only for Obama, but for progressive, liberal politics in the U.S. and anywhere else on this continent, including Canada. It may also spell the beginning, whether we like it or not, of the Palin era.

Indeed, Palin was reportedly among one of the first to email Brown and congratulate him on a victorious campaign that was spent opposing almost every liberal position Ted Kennedy stood for, including publicly funded, universal health care, which Kennedy described before he died from a brain tumor last August as “the cause of (his) life.”

Brown’s victory in Massachusetts – a state that has had such a history of voting for Democrats that, in 1972, it was the only state in the country where a majority voted for the Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern over the incumbent Richard Nixon – means that Obama now finds himself one vote in the U.S. Senate short of what he needs to pass health care reform and other key initiatives around green energy and climate change without possibly facing an exhaustive filibuster from the Republic opposition.

And to the extent the results of this January’s Massachusetts election put the brakes on Obama’s agenda for change, Canadians can possibly forget about seeing much change in our country when it comes to taking progressive steps to conserve energy and fight climate change, just to name a few examples of progressive steps on transit, education and other areas we need to take in a in a 21st century world where countries like China, India and Brazil are rapidly leaving us in the coal dust.  I base that conclusion on repeated statements made by Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, that Canada will not act in these areas unless the United States (still Canada’s largest trade partner) acts first.

So one can only speculate where we go from here. Are we stuck with a status quo – burning gas, oil and coal – and not really doing much of anything to accelerate toward energy independence and cleaner sources of energy? Does Canada have no choice but to continue succumbing to the pressures of private health insurers and pharmaceutical companies in the United States to have Canadians join their neighbours in moving away from publicly funded health care and toward a system where the best health care goes to those who have the means to pay out of their own pockets?

Funny what an election in one little state in New England might do to the fate of public programs and policies in both countries.

As someone who has spent enough of my life in Cape Cod, Massachusetts to possibly qualify for an honourary citizenship, I already had a feeling in my gut that the liberal era Ted Kennedy and his family represented was drawing to a close as I watched a hearse carrying his coffin leave the Kennedy compound on the Cape last August. But there was still some faint hope in the crowds of people lining the funeral route that day that another Kennedy would pick up the mantle. Maybe one of Ted’s or his brother Bobby’s sons. Maybe his wife Vicki.

But it didn’t happen and the person who ran to replace the Massachusetts senate seat instead – one Martha Coakley – ran such a lame campaign that Ted and his brother John could only be crying up there, if there is an up there.

Coakley, said Steven Rowan, one of my friends from Massachusetts, “was a rather lackluster candidate and it was apparent that the machine had picked her. The Democratic machine has failed because it forgot the big reason for winning – that Ted Kennedy was a big person, a big candidate (and) a big politician. …”

Now that failure could haunt all of us unless Obama, who has tried so hard to be a unifying force in his country that he has let the partisan politics of his Republican opponents crap all over him, finally gets tough and fights back.

Will he fight back? Will he finally say; ‘To hell with the opposition. I am going to get back to pushing through the change I promised when I excited so many in my county and others around the world while I was running for president.”

If he doesn’t, those of us who believe that we have to move beyond the 19th century filth of coal and oil, and the robbers on Wall and Bay Streets, to a greener, more just and promising future in this still new century will be the biggest losers.

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