Reply #39: Carter is very honest, but like any politician ambitious enough to run [View All]

[karynnj]

for President, he is concerned with his reputation. In addition, if anything, Carter's reputation for telling the truth has ignored that he is a more complex person that the near saint that he often is portrayed as. Carter and his people have never forgiven Kennedy, which is understandable, but not commendable. (It is telling to me that he does not forgive Kennedy, but hosted a William Calley day when he was released from prison.) However, as that link shows it was not just Kennedy opposing his plan that doomed it. I really think that part of the problem with both Carter's and Clinton's efforts was that they did not understand Congress well enough when they attempted this.

What I dislike here is that this is one year after Kennedy died. Carter has been out of office for 30 years. Had Carter passed health care, it would have been, with Camp David, the cornerstone accomplishment of his Presidency. Yet Carter did not make the claim in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, or 2000s - he waited until now. That leaves no possibility of Kennedy responding and. I suspect, that many of the most senior Senators of that time are also dead.

The reason it makes little sense to me is that Kennedy in the late 1970s was not the liberal lion he became. He was not the chair of the committee that oversaw healthcare, Senator Williams, who was kicked out over ABSCAM in 1980 and who died in 2001, was. Now, obviously during the year Kennedy opposed him, he did criticize Carter's actions on this. Kennedy's star power was less in the Senate, than in his place with the American people as the surviving Kennedy brother. That celebrity was behind the media pushing Kennedy to run - long before he himself signaled any likelihood of doing so. Part of the media pushing that was the perception that Carter was failing.