RAGGED THOTS

There's a definite poignancy to Sen. Ted Kennedy's letter to MA Gov. Deval Patrick and state legislative leadersurging a change in state law to allow Patrick to appoint an immediate successor should the cancer-stricken Kennedy either give up his seat or die in office. The current law, passed in 2004, leaves the seat open pending a special election which cannot take place any later than 145 days after the seat has become vacant.

The letter is written with a tone of awareness of mortality -- and the realization that in the curren political environment, every vote will be critical on healht-care.

Only problem is that, with all respect to the ill Senate legend, this is the rawest form of partisan politics -- even for him. He supported the 2004 change -- which was precisely designed by the Democratic-heavy state legislature to prevent then-Gov. Mitt Romney, a Republican, from having the ability to fill a possible vacant seat if John Kerry had won the presidency that year. In other words, had the pre-2004 law been in place, Kennedy's letter wouldn't have been necessary. Patrick would have been able to appoint a successor at any time. Indeed, it's arguable that Kennedy might have already stepped down given his grave condition.

But now, the circumstances have changed: Kennedy realizes that -- despite the day-to-day problems of Obama's health-care proposal -- this is the best chance ever to make his life-long ambition, a national health-care insurance, a reality. He can't stand the irony that his absence -- or the absence of another Democratic vote -- might prevent that from occurring. So, he's trying to get a law he supported overturned.

What makes this even more unseemly is that it harkens back to how Kennedy first got the seat. When John F. Kennedy won the White House in 1962, little brother Ted wasn't yet of the Constitution-mandated age of 30 to be able to be appointed the seat. And so, the Kennedys turned to family friend Benjamin Smith to keep the seat warm until Ted could run for it in 1962.

The same dynamics are in play again -- Kennedy is recommending that whoever is picked for the seat not run for it permanently. While that gives a veneer of "non-parttisanship" to the selection process, it actually would obviously benefit any other politicians with large campaign war-chests or great name-recognition -- of which there are plenty of both in Massachusetts. Ted's nephew, former Rep. Joe, as a likely heir to the seat that has been in Kennedy control

Sorry, but Sen. Kennedy shouldn't be allowed to have it both ways -- just to benefit his own policy or political preferences. The current law should remain in place and the political chips should fall where they may.

The first senator elected directly to the Oval Office since 1960, Obama has an entirely different theory of how to exercise presidential power, and he has consciously designed his administration to avoid Clinton’s fate. After winning the office with the same kind of outsider appeal as his predecessors, he has quietly but methodically assembled the most Congress-centric administration in modern history. Obama’s White House is run by Rahm Emanuel, a former House leader who was generally considered to be on a fast track to the speakership before he resigned to become chief of staff, and it is teeming with aides plucked from the senior ranks of both chambers. Obama seems to think that the dysfunction in Washington isn’t only about the heightened enmity between the parties; it’s also about the longstanding mistrust between the two branches of government that stare each other down from twin peaks on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

And so, from Obama’s perspective, passing a health care plan this fall isn’t primarily a question of whether to include an “individual mandate” requiring every American to have insurance or how fully to regulate providers or even how to hit back against “Harry and Louise”–type attack ads, although his aides spend time contemplating all of those things. It’s more about navigating the dueling personalities and complex agendas within his own party’s Congress. Rather than laying out an intricate plan and then trying to sell it on the Hill, as Clinton did, Obama’s strategy seems to be exactly the opposite — to sell himself to Congress first and worry about the details later. As Emanuel likes to tell his West Wing staff: “The only nonnegotiable principle here is success. Everything else is negotiable.”

Alas, for Democrats, any "success" coming out of the Congress at this point is going to look like something akin to "failure." And, despite Obama's aforementioned plan to assemble a Congress-friendly staff, the result is becoming perilously close to the fate suffered by Obama's Democratic predecessors, Carter and Clinton -- as The New Republic's Jonathan Chait predicted in the spring:

The contours of failure are now clearly visible. In Obama's case, as with his predecessors, the prospective culprit is the same: Democrats in Congress, and especially the Senate. At a time when the country desperately needs a coherent response to the array of challenges it faces, the congressional arm of the Democratic Party remains mired in fecklessness, parochialism, and privilege. Obama has made mistakes, as did his predecessors. Yet the constant recurrence of legislative squabbling and drift suggests a deeper problem than any characterological or tactical failures by these presidents: a congressional party that is congenitally unable to govern.

But, the question of governance is a double-edged sword. Yes, the "congressional party" can't seem to govern -- but why can't the executive part of the Democratic Party manage to demand allegiance either? As Maxine Waters noted a couple weeks back, a good portion of the Blue Dog Democrats in the House owe their seats to chief of staff Rahm Emanuel who recruited them when he was the head of the Democratic Congressional Committee.

Emanuel was brought in as a White House enforcer. Is he the problem -- or does it ultimately come down to his boss, again, the man who seemingly would prefer to be loved rather than feared. Given his eroding poll numbers, it's starting to look like he's going to end up being neither.