Joe Kennedy III Wins Primary for Barney Frank's Congressional Seat

BROOKLINE, Mass. — Days after Joseph P. Kennedy III stood in front of the Democratic National Convention to offer a tribute to his great-uncle, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, he found himself on a smaller platform just outside Boston, shaking hands with commuters at a public transit station here on the first day of his general election campaign in the Fourth Congressional District of Massachusetts.

Mr. Kennedy, 31, handily won his primary election Thursday, taking 90 percent of the vote in a contest with two relatively unknown rivals, Rachel Brown and Herb Robinson, and once again keeping the Kennedy name prominent in Massachusetts politics.

A former assistant district attorney and Peace Corps volunteer, Mr. Kennedy is hoping to take the seat occupied by Barney Frank, who announced last fall that he would retire after representing the district for more than 30 years.

“Those are very, very, very big shoes to fill,” said Bobbi Fox, 58, a software engineer who, like Mr. Frank, lives in Newton, Mass., and was chatting with Mr. Kennedy on Friday evening. She said that she planned to vote for Mr. Kennedy but that he still needed to prove himself to voters who probably knew more about his family than about him.

Mr. Kennedy’s challenger, Sean Bielat, shares the sentiment.

“Based on what I’ve seen from his résumé, it’s pretty thin,” said Mr. Bielat, who defeated Elizabeth Childs, a former state health commissioner, and David Steinhof, a dentist, in the Republican primary.

Mr. Bielat, 37, a businessman and a former Marine, ran an aggressive race against Mr. Frank in 2010.

View the original article here

Ted Kennedy Helped Shape Mitt Romney’s Career, and Still Haunts It

Twelve years earlier, they shared that stage as opponents in a bitter Senate race. Back then, Mr. Romney accused Mr. Kennedy of waging “untrue, unfair and sleazy” personal attacks. Now, the Republican governor was introducing the liberal Democratic senator as “my collaborator and friend.”

Mr. Romney’s complicated relationship with Mr. Kennedy, from campaign foe to health care partner, helped shape both his political career and his image. Today, as a Republican candidate for president, he is courting conservative voters, a constituency that does not look kindly upon Mr. Kennedy or the Romney approach to health care, which will come under scrutiny again this week when the Supreme Court takes up challenges to a similar measure championed by President Obama.

But try as he might to distance himself, Mr. Romney cannot escape Mr. Kennedy’s influence. On the campaign trail, he uses the senator, who died in 2009, as a foil, denouncing Mr. Kennedy’s “liberal welfare state” policies and boasting of how Mr. Kennedy “had to take out a mortgage on his house to make sure he could defeat me.”

He has said losing to Mr. Kennedy was “the best thing” that could have happened to him, “because it put me back in the private sector.”

Mr. Romney’s attempt in 1994 to “out-Kennedy Kennedy,” as people here say, led him to take stands on issues like abortion and gay rights that he has since backed away from, giving rise to accusations that he is a flip-flopper. Mr. Kennedy’s tough campaign advertisements, which portrayed Mr. Romney as a cold-hearted financier, rattled him, and his bruising loss in the race “viscerally pained” him, one friend said.

But he emerged tougher, convinced that it is better to punch first than to counterpunch later — lessons his campaign is putting to use today.

“Romney was the young up-and-comer in ’94 who thought that the aging champ had lost his edge and was then surprised to get knocked out,” said Rob Gray, a Republican strategist who advised Mr. Romney in his 2002 race for governor. “That certainly caused him to reassess how any future campaign should be built.”

The two men could not have been more different. Mr. Kennedy was the back-slapping Irish pol with the rakish past; Mr. Romney the upstanding businessman who viewed Mr. Kennedy with some disdain. While they eventually joined forces, theirs was a transactional relationship. Despite Mr. Romney’s glowing Faneuil Hall introduction, they never truly became friends.

“I just don’t think they spoke the same language,” said Scott M. Ferson, a former Kennedy aide and Romney neighbor who became a bridge between the two.

They did extend courtesies to each other. Mr. Kennedy lent his support to the construction of a Mormon temple in Belmont, Mass., a project just minutes from Mr. Romney’s home and dear to him. Later, as governor, Mr. Romney turned up during the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston for the dedication of a ribbon of parks named for Mr. Kennedy’s mother, Rose.

But it was their work on health care, a lifelong passion for Mr. Kennedy, that may have had the most enduring impact on Mr. Romney. The legislation gave him national standing to run for president in 2008, only to emerge as a political liability in the current campaign in a way that neither man could have foreseen.

“It’s an irony with a capital I,” said Jeffrey M. Berry, a political scientist at Tufts University who followed their careers. “From the grave, Ted Kennedy is involved in the Republican race for the presidency.”

Mr. Romney and Mr. Kennedy entered the 1994 Senate race as strangers, but their families had been circling each other for decades.

Mr. Romney was 15 in 1962, when Mr. Kennedy was first elected to the Senate. That same year, George W. Romney, Mitt’s father, was elected governor of Michigan; Mr. Kennedy’s brother, President John F. Kennedy, campaigned for his Democratic opponent. Decades later, the elder Romney — who had once worked with Senator Kennedy on legislation promoting volunteerism — prodded his son to run for the Senate seat Mr. Kennedy occupied.

View the original article here

Dems invoke the ‘Kennedy Card’ to defend Obamacare in wake of failing CLASS Act (Daily Caller)

House Democrats worked to tug on the heartstrings Wednesday, playing to the “Kennedy card” several times while defending Obamacare in a congressional hearing. Sen. Ted Kennedy, who passed away in 2009, called socialized medicine “the cause of my life.”

The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health, and the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, were holding a joint hearing on the failures of Obamacare’s Community Living Assistance Services and Supports Act, or CLASS Act.

The CLASS Act was supposed to be the part of Obamacare that provided a public “long-term care” option. It was also supposed to be financially self-sustaining. Conservative allegations that the CLASS Act was not financially self-sustaining were confirmed a little over a week ago when President Obama’s Health and Human Service Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced that the administration will not be implementing the CLASS Act because it is not financially solvent and, Sebelius said, it has no “viable path forward.”

Republicans view the CLASS Act’s failure as a major victory in the fight against Obamacare — and point to it as a “gimmick” used to make the president’s signature legislation look less expensive.

As the CLASS Act, and Obamacare in its entirety, came under fire yet again in Wednesday’s hearing, Democrats turned to the “Kennedy card” as one of their most frequent defenses.

Former Rhode Island Democratic Rep. Patrick Kennedy even came back to Congress to defend the CLASS Act, a “key priority” of his father — former Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy. Patrick Kennedy testified as part of special hearing panel that included Louisiana Republican Rep. Charles Boustany, Montana Republican Rep. Denny Rehberg and Florida Democratic Rep. Ted Deutch. The other panel that testified before the subcommittee consisted of two senior Obama administration officials, who were present to defend the CLASS Act.

Texas Democratic Rep. Gene Green offered glowing remarks for the late senator’s son, and thanked Patrick Kennedy for Ted Kennedy’s work in Congress. “I want to particularly welcome our former colleague Patrick Kennedy. Patrick, we worked together on lots of mental health issues over the years and I want to thank you for your service to the American people, and particularly to your district in Rhode Island,” Green said before defending Obamacare. “But, also I want to thank you for the service of your father. Without your father’s work in the Senate, I don’t have enough fingers and toes to list the issues that would not be in the law today, including the CLASS Act. [I want] just to generally thank you for the service of your family — I think all of us thank you for that.”

Illinois Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky cited Patrick Kennedy in her comments, too. “As former Representative Kennedy said, repealing the CLASS Act doesn’t mean that the widespread financial, physical and emotional suffering of older and disabled Americans goes away,” Schakowsky said as she questioned an Obama administration Health and Human Services official.

Right before accusing Republicans of turning the now-failed CLASS Act into a “political football,” Florida Democratic Rep. Kathy Castor invoked Kennedy rhetoric: “I’m going to borrow Patrick Kennedy’s language of a ‘Demographic Tsunami,’” Castor said, referring to issues she thinks exist in the long-term healthcare industry.

Florida Democratic Rep. Ted Deutch cited Ted Kennedy’s “dream” in his comments to the committee. Deutch isn’t a member of the Energy and Commerce committee, but appeared with Patrick Kennedy, Rehberg and Boustany on the opening special panel. “Senator Kennedy eloquently captured how our long-term care system is failing the American people when he said, ‘too often, they have to give up the American Dream — the dignity of a job, a home, and a family — so they can qualify for Medicaid, the only program that will support them,’” Deutch said in prepared testimony.

Even Patrick Kennedy played the Kennedy card. In his testimony, he cited his father’s work on the CLASS Act and how his father was deathly ill while working on finishing the legislation. “Our family was very fortunate,” Patrick Kennedy said in his prepared testimony. “We had the resources to provide my father with any long-term services and supports that he needed as he approached the end of his life — but he knew that most working families are not as fortunate. The inclusion of the long-term care infrastructure (CLASS) in health care reform was a signature issue for my father.”

“Even before he became ill, my father saw a need for an alternative solution, realizing that for persons with disabilities and older Americans, long-term services and supports are their primary unmet care need, and that while 45 million Americans lack medical insurance, 200 million adult Americans lack any insurance protection against the costs of these services,” Patrick Kennedy added.

Republican Rehberg, in his testimony, said the Democrats’ testimonies were political spin. Rehberg, who is the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, hit the Democrats for hiding the damage caused by the CLASS Act underneath political games.

“Once we stripped away the political spin, brushed off budget gimmicks and cut through the bureaucratic jungle, we saw a foundation pillar [the CLASS Act] of the president’s healthcare law for what it really was: truly a Ponzi scheme that apparently was included in the bill solely to help the bill appear deficit-neutral,” Rehberg said.

Follow Matthew on Twitter

Read more stories from The Daily Caller

Cards, Rangers both asked for divine help in game 6

The bloated rise of the diversitocracy

White House orders independent review of Solyndra scandal

Al-Qaida plants its flag --- literally --- in Libya

A closer look at James Madison, 'Father of Politics'

View the original article here