There have been preludes to this fracas between the Roman Catholic bishop of Providence, Thomas Tobin, and Representative Patrick Kennedy, Teddy's son and the last of the dynasty in public life. It is, of course, a fracas about abortion and the view of the church that Kennedy's (what shall I say?) insufficient opposition to it in public law excludes him from the rites of the faith, especially communion.
Over the past 40 years, Edward Moore Kennedy was the grand statesman of the Democratic liberalism that emerged out of the 1960s. He was a loyalist to his principles even when those principles fell completely out of fashion. He overcame personal flaws and searing travails to become a masterful legislator, congressional infighter, and builder of unlikely coalitions. Ironically, he achieved all of this only after he had surmounted the political entitlement that made his career possible in the first place.
