Newer World

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy at the 1980 Democratic National Convention.

The first presidential vote I ever cast was for Sen. Edward M. Kennedy in the 1980 Kentucky Democratic primary. In doing so, I was sailing against the wind. It was the beginning of a conservative era, and my generation was more conservative than most.

Under Jimmy Carter, the Democratic Party had moved to the right, and Carter’s presidency was to give way to that of the arch-conservative Republican Ronald Reagan.

Nearly 20 years later, it was another conservative Democratic president, Bill Clinton, who announced that the “era of big government is over.” This was the same president who ended welfare as we had known it, reduced the size of the federal government and had the first federal budget surplus since 1968.

How could Clinton have known that a Republican president, George W. Bush, would revive big government, and that his successor, Democrat Barack Obama, would be given a mandate to create the most activist liberal government since that of Lyndon Baines Johnson in the late 1960s?

As an 19-year-old college student, watching Kennedy’s concession speech on TV that night of the Democratic National Convention in New York, I was inspired, as many were. Kennedy’s speech admitted that many of his ideas had fallen out of fashion — commitment to the poor, to working people, to the environment, to the goal of universal health care, to the idea that government can play an active role in reviving the economy and creating a more just and prosperous society.

I made a poster for my bedroom with a newspaper photo of Kennedy and words from his speech, in which he quoted Tennyson and promised that “the dream shall never die.” Those words gave me goose bumps when I heard him deliver them in that great baritone voice.

“The commitment I seek is not to outworn views but to old values that will never wear out,” Kennedy said. “Programs may sometimes become obsolete, but the ideal of fairness always endures. Circumstances may change, but the work of compassion must continue. It is surely correct that we cannot solve problems by throwing money at them, but it is also correct that we dare not throw out our national problems onto a scrap heap of inattention and indifference.”

Nearly three decades later, Kennedy’s kind of liberalism is again finding favor. Public opinion polls that show that people in their 20s especially are overwhelmingly progressive, even if they are more conservative than their parents on a few issues, such as abortion.

After 30 years in the wilderness, the Democratic Party seems to have, in Kennedy’s words, found its “faith again.”

The senator ended his 1980 convention speech by saying, “For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

I’m glad he lived long enough to see his causes once again become the causes of the the Democratic Party and the majority of the American people. And Kennedy deserves credit for doing the lion’s share of the work to keep hope alive during all those years when liberals were in the minority, even within his own party.

Senator Kennedy has gone to his eternal rest. But his “dream shall never die.” It is, in fact, the American Dream of a better society for all our people.