Ted Kennedy Gets a Little Republican Respect

05/30/2007

By Elizabeth Williamson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 30, 2007


In a recent speech to a Mississippi civic group, Sen. Trent Lott brought up Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's role on important domestic legislation, including Kennedy's latest push to overhaul the nation's immigration laws.

When Lott was finished, a man in the audience came up to him and said: "You did real good. But that part about Kennedy -- don't say that no more."

"He is the number one boogeyman for conservative Republicans," Lott said later of the longtime Democratic senator from Massachusetts. But, Lott added, "he is a good legislator, and you can't take that away from him."

That Lott would praise a liberal icon of the Democratic Party might seem odd. But Kennedy's work on the immigration bill is, in fact, the third time he has thrown himself behind a major initiative of President Bush's. Kennedy gave crucial support to two of the president's key first-term domestic achievements, the No Child Left Behind education law and a Medicare prescription drug bill. That he helped Republicans burnish their record on such trademark Democratic issues as education and health care mystified some in both parties. But his alliance with Bush on immigration is simply a matter of necessity.

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