Thread: The election’s over – it’s Ted Kennedy’s seat

The Knockout punch, Healtcare Vote

The election’s over – it’s Ted Kennedy’s seat

By Arthur Weinreb
Thursday, January 21, 2010

People watch hockey games because they like the action and some have a lot of knowledge and understand the minute intricacies of the game. But there are those who watch hockey simply to see fights break out and the hopefully ensuing blood that is spilled. The same can be said of watching political debates. While political junkies watch with avid interest and judge the nuance of every back and forth exchange, there are those that simply watch in anticipation of the knockout punch that seldom ever comes.

In Canada, where federal elections are held about every four years or whenever the prime minister or the opposition feels like having one, these so called knockout punches are few and far between. There have only been a couple of them in recent memory.

Scott Brown scored one of these rarities in his debate with Martha Coakley. David Gergen, CNN’s answer to an impartial moderator, asked Brown how he could sit in Ted Kennedy’s seat and vote against the healthcare bill. In a country where Kennedy was and still is idolized by the left, Gergen’s view was that voting by someone occupying the seat once held by Kennedy and contrary to the way he would have voted was somehow sacrilegious. Brown shot back that it wasn’t Ted Kennedy’s seat and it wasn’t the Democrats’ seat – it was the people’s seat. Brown’s retort to Gergen has been compared to Lloyd Bentsen’s shot at Dan Quayle during the 1988 vice presidential debate. After Quayle mentioned John F. Kennedy, Bentsen shot back that he knew and worked with Kennedy and said, “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.â€

The seat is not Kennedys' seat. It is the people's seat and it was the people that elected the Kennedys and re-elected them for years. It was the choice of the people of Massachusetts that the Kennedy tenure was so long. And now the people have spoken again with their votes. They are the employers of whomever assumes that position, and for too many years there has been no respect by the employee for the employers.