I still can't believe he's gone. (4.00 / 1)

He's actually gone? Hopefully, the spirit of our Liberal Lion will live on and inspire a new generation of leaders to keep the good work going.

Yes, Virginia, there are progressives in Nevada.

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by: Andrew Davey @ Wed Aug 26, 2009 at 14:24:22 PM UTC

Not to disparage Kennedy (0.00 / 0)

But Henry Clay was a pretty pivotal figure in the Senate as well. He's the only one I think could be mentioned in the same breath as Kennedy.  

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by: arbitrista @ Wed Aug 26, 2009 at 14:33:58 PM UTC

Walter Johnson was the greatest Senator (0.00 / 0)

Now that I got the baseball joke out of the way, I did dig up through Google an old poll of historians and political scientists:

Henry Clay of Kentucky, known as the ''Great Compromiser'' for his mediation between the North and the South before the Civil War, has been ranked as the nation's greatest Senator in a national poll of college professors.

Clay was followed by Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota, Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, Robert La Follette Sr. of Wisconsin, George Norris of Nebraska, Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, Everett Dirksen of Illinois, Jacob Javits of New York, Stephen Douglas of Illinois, and Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, The Milwaukee Sentinel reported Saturday.

Other names who seem to pop up in the conversation if you are making a list are Robert Wagner, John Calhoun, Everett Dirksen, and Robert Taft.

Kennedy fits in that company quite well.

Things You Don't Talk About in Polite Company: Religion, Politics, the Occasional Intersection of Both

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by: Anthony de Jesus @ Wed Aug 26, 2009 at 15:00:26 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Stepen Douglas? Really? (0.00 / 0)

The Kansas-Nebraska act sure worked out well!  Good thing that his motivation behind it was so pure!

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by: Valatan @ Wed Aug 26, 2009 at 15:42:38 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Lack tenure (0.00 / 0)

Clay is over rated.  He seved 17 years in the Senate in four satretches.  Some of what he wanted and worked for become law.  Much of it did not last.  Oddly, Clay perhaps was more important in the House.  He served 11 years there, 10 as Speaker.  He was also Secretary of State and a nominee for President ( plus a multi-time candidate).  As a Senator, Clay does not come close to Ted Kennedy or many of the others on this list (which is pretty poor IMO).

In a real non-sequitur, Henry Clay was related to a lot of Clays who were in politics. One, Cassius Marcellus Clay, was described as the most famous southern Emancipator (he freed his slaves in 1844).  What the relation, if any, is to the great boxer, I don't know.  I would assume there was some.

Lyndon Johnson is a very serious contender for the greatest Senator ever.  His one weakness is that he served only 12 years in the Senate.

Everett Dirksen is what I'd love to have Mitch McConnell be.  He was a minority leader and had fewer votes at hand than McConnell (his 36 little soldiers IIRC).  Instead of blocking things, Dirksen used those votes to shape things and to get things done.  Dirksen was indispensible to the passage of much civil rights legislation.  He was also one of the most colorful Senators I can remember.  Everrett Dirksen's nationally televised half hour version of the Christmas story is something I will remember fondly till the day I die.  The one negative here is length of service.  Dirksen served 18 years; Ted Kennedy served 46.

Daniel Webster was certainly an important voice in the slavery debate but what did he do?  Interestingly enough, Webster and John Kennedy (and Tip O'Neill) represented the same district in the House. So did John Kennedy's grandfather John Fitzgerald.

LaFollette and Norris are names fondly remembered.  Again, what did they do?  Kennedy was behind a lot of legislation.

One name that pops into my mind is John Sherman of Ohio.  He served in the Senate for over 30 years and is remembered over 100 years later for the still important Sherman Anti-trust Act.  Yes, Sherman was the younger brother of Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman. Before being a Senator, John Sherman was a power in the US House during his brief time there.  Again, I suspect he was more tactful but less colorful, than his brother.  The general after all left us with "War is Hell", "I'd rather serve four years in a penitentiary than the White House", "Too much lion, not enough fox", and the immortal "If nominated I will not run; if elected I will not serve" that serves as the model for all expressions of political non-interest since labeled Shermanesque.

Wikipedia lists all Senators who served 36 years or more and it is a mostly uninspiring group.  The ones that stood out were Bobby Byrd, Strom Thurmond, Ted Kennedy, Fritz Hollings, John Stennis, and Eastland.  Ted Kennedy was the class of the group.  Some like Ted Stevens and IMO Strom Thurmond were embarrassments.  Some were pretty much long-serving non-entities.  Some wielded power.  Hey, Joe Biden had 36 years in the Senate.  Do you consider him a rival?  I think not.

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by: David Kowalski @ Wed Aug 26, 2009 at 15:44:05 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Ted Kennedy would (0.00 / 0)

definitely be a strong candidate for greatest senator ever, especially when we consider all the hard work and influence he wielded behind the scenes in good causes.

Another candidate, not mentioned yet, would be Mike Mansfield (MajLeader 1961-77), who was self-effacing almost to a fault but who nevertheless presided over quite a few progressive legislative accomplishments.  One smart move he made, which also in its way paid tribute to Ted Kennedy, was his decision early in 1973 to take the info TK's subcomm'ee had gathered on Watergate (quite a lot actually) and have a select comm'ee headed by Sam Ervin take over.  Mansfield knew Teddy running the show against Nixon in Congress would only badly politicize things and probably derail the investigation.

MM was also the key person, and not Pres Johnson, whose strategy enabled the CivRts bill to overcome the filibuster and become law in 1964.  Mansfield worked well with JFK, who agreed with MM on not sending combat troops to VN.  Alas, in LBJ, Mansfield only met with stupid stubbornness on this issue and for a long time Johnson cut him out of consultations on Nam.

Johnson, imo, was of course very colorful and brash and crude, but much of what he did as senator and ML in the 50s involved modest and watered-down legislation.  Not much there for liberals to get excited about.  

DIrksen?  Until roughly 1964 he was known as another colorful and blowhard senator known primarily for blocking progressive legislation, though by today's standards he would be considered a mod-lib Repub.  In 64 though after Dallas, he began to play ball on some key Kennedy-originated legislation, and it was his agreement to work with Mansfield on CivRts that enabled Dems to get the 2/3 to invoke cloture.  Without his cooperation, the southern segregationist Ds would have won once again.

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by: Brodie @ Wed Aug 26, 2009 at 16:28:28 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Clay served in the Senate for all of four years (4.00 / 1)

Robert Taft vehemently opposed the New Deal and despised organized labor, so I definitely wouldn't include him.  Arthur Vandenberg was the Harry Reid of his day.

And I wonder who named Stephen Douglas?  I'd assume Grady McWhiney and Clyde Wilson were among those polled.

Not to be flip, but for the most part, you're list is all wet.

The only people I'd mention with Kennedy are Bob LaFollette and Robert Wagner.  

 

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by: wobbly @ Wed Aug 26, 2009 at 15:44:17 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

I meant four stretches (0.00 / 0)

over roughly 14 years - but he was better known for his work as Speaker of the House.

And whether he chose to emancipate his slaves or not, he effected compromises that assured the continued viability of the slave system.  It's also worth noting that Lincoln revered him.  

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by: wobbly @ Wed Aug 26, 2009 at 15:50:15 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Whether or not Clay's compromises were good is an interesting question (0.00 / 0)

Certainly, if the Civil war had happened in 1820, or during the nullification crisis, the South would have been much better positioned to win it.  Who knows what that would have looked like, or ended up as, though.

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by: Valatan @ Wed Aug 26, 2009 at 15:58:43 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

That's far from certain (0.00 / 0)

and they gave it a pretty good shot as it was. Indeed, their central state apparatus was far stronger than that of the North.  But there were ironies to that too.

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by: wobbly @ Wed Aug 26, 2009 at 16:03:35 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

I did say 'much better positioned' and not 'certain' (0.00 / 0)

The North's main advantages were a greater population, the beginnings of a railroad network and a large industrial base.  None of this was as well developed in 1820.  Of course, the South didn't have the same quality of generals then, either.  

But I'm pretty sure that the historical consensus is that the South was in a stronger position during the nullification crisis than it was in 1860.

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by: Valatan @ Wed Aug 26, 2009 at 16:06:54 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Its far from certain (0.00 / 0)

that they would've been better positioned for a whole host of reasons.  

And the configuration of states in the confederacy would have been much different, with the very recently settled cotton states far more vulnerable.  

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by: wobbly @ Wed Aug 26, 2009 at 16:24:53 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

but it's undeniable that their share of the national GDP and (0.00 / 0)

the national population would have been greater.  And you could say the same thing about a bunch of Northern states that wouldn't have been added to the Union.  Since I don't have the time to go and add up the populations, let's just use EV as a rough measure of population:

future confederate EV share, 1820: 75/231 = 32.5%
future confederate EV share, 1860: 88/303 = 29.0%

The decline in the Southern share of the national GDP would be even more stark, as the slave based cotton economy was becoming less profitable while the Northern industrial economy was beginning to boom.  

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by: Valatan @ Wed Aug 26, 2009 at 16:40:22 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Would the south have been able (0.00 / 0)

to mobilize their human and material resources as efficiently?   They did this far, far, far more so than the north in 1860.  

And you need to consider that a big part of northern GDP came from processing southern staple goods, selling wheat to the south, and extending credit to southern planters.  

This was a national economy, and simply isolating parts of it by region to evaluate relative strength obscures more than it reveals.

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by: wobbly @ Wed Aug 26, 2009 at 16:57:10 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Emancipation (0.00 / 0)

Henry Clay did not emancipate slaves AFAIK; Cassius Marcellus Clay did.  So did Robert E. Lee fwiw. It says something that given five days in Lexington, Kentucky this summer, we went 100 miles to visit Lincoln's birthplace, visited his uncle's place, visited Lincoln's wife's home but did not visit Henry Clay's house in Lexington. Nice house, we drove past it.

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by: David Kowalski @ Wed Aug 26, 2009 at 16:10:34 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Amen. (4.00 / 1)

What a man.  

John McCain: Beacuse lobbyists should have more power

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by: Populista @ Wed Aug 26, 2009 at 19:58:09 PM UTC