Tomorrow night, we’ll learn the identity of Ted Kennedy’s successor in the U.S. Senate. Or, actually, we’ll learn the identity of his successor’s successor.
Eager to provide the White House with a 60th vote for health care this fall, the overwhelmingly Democratic Massachusetts legislature voted to change the state’s succession law just after Kennedy’s death Read More
The final day of Michael Dukakis’ final—and most improbable, unconventional and just plain bizarre—campaign for political office began on a bad note Wednesday morning.
Influential Democrats in Washington, reacting to The Boston Globe’s endorsement of Dukakis for an interim Senate appointment a day earlier, had fought back by telling The Read More
Martha Coakley, the Massachusetts attorney general and candidate for U.S. Senate, has played this role before and lost. Twelve years ago, when she was a politically hungry assistant D.A. and her local state representative quit mid-term, Coakley jumped into the special election—the only woman running against four men. It seemed like good strategy.
But she Read More
At least he’s not Jack the Tongue.
That’s probably the reaction of many Massachusetts Republicans to the news that Andy Card, best known as George W. Bush’s chief of staff for five years, may soon join the special election race to fill Ted Kennedy’s vacant Senate seat.
Card, 62, actually has a long Read More
All hell broke loose at the Hachette Book Group building last week when The New York Times published a story detailing some of the most newsworthy bits contained in the late Ted Kennedy’s forthcoming memoir, True Compass. A spokeswoman for the paper said Times reporters had purchased multiple copies of the book at a bookstore Read More
Joe Kennedy, the son of Bobby who was marked as a future statewide candidate in Massachusetts from the instant he claimed a House seat in 1986, just took himself out of the running for his Uncle Ted’s vacant Senate seat.
The move, not a major surprise to those who have followed Read More
One of the more fascinating byproducts of the political upheaval unleashed by Ted Kennedy’s death could be an unexpected—and brief—return to the public stage for Michael Dukakis.
The former Massachusetts governor’s name has been widely circulated this week as a possible interim successor to the late senator—someone who would hold the Read More
Health care advocates are trying to use the passing of Ted Kennedy to help galvanize support for the stalled health care legislation in Washington.
One conservative pundit told me today that the effort to associate the "liberal lion" with a bill that is already giving Republicans and moderate Democrats pause Read More
Ted Kennedy’s death has several immediate political implications.
One is the question of health care strategy for Democrats in the U.S. Senate. Without Kennedy, Democrats will only have 59 votes—one short of the 60 needed to kill Republican-led filibusters.
This would seem, then, to strengthen the case for using reconciliation—the Read More
