More Kennedy

Most people who wrote and talked about Ted Kennedy's death last week said the death was the end of an era, but WSWS argues liberalism as it should be known was gone long before the senator passed away:

As for Kennedy’s bid to unseat Carter, the elevation of this conservative Southern governor as the Democrats’ 1976 presidential candidate was a milestone in the shift to the right of that party and American politics as a whole in the aftermath of Watergate and the defeat in Vietnam. Carter’s election was followed by a Democratic defeat in the 1978 congressional elections, which saw a further exit of prominent liberal Democratic legislators.

Kennedy’s presidential bid was broadly opposed by the media and he was rejected by his party. He took his defeat in 1980 as the sign of an irreversible abandonment of liberal reform policies by the Democratic Party and reconciled himself to the changed political landscape. He spent the rest of his political career seeking to enact minor administrative reforms and serving as a deal-maker in the Senate, while accepting his self-demeaning role as the spokesman of a politically bankrupt American liberalism.