If the Kennedy Era in American politics is over, instead of just taking a breather (Joseph P. Kennedy II has been mentioned as a possible candidate for his Uncle Ted’s Senate seat), what did it mean?

Character failings are not irrelevant to how well one serves the public; it was because of Chappaquiddick that Ted Kennedy was defeated by Robert Byrd as Democratic party whip in the Senate in 1971. But defenders are so quick to dismiss these issues, so let’s stick to policy instead, and see if the liberal argument that Kennedy’s political work made up for his personal faults is true.

Consider a moment that showed us the essence of Ted Kennedy: Sept. 9, 1974. On that day, he came down from Olympus to visit Boston. A federal judge had thrown the city into chaos by imposing a draconian busing plan to integrate the city’s schools. Kids were uprooted from their neighborhoods and sent to ones where they weren’t welcome.

“Busing struck most ordinary people as both unfair and hypocritical,” wrote The Economist’s John Micklethwait and Adrian Woolridge in their book “The Right Nation.” “Unfair because children were forced against their will to achieve ‘racial balance,’ hypocritical because the ‘liberal elites’ [including Kennedy] that supported the policy usually sent their own children to private or suburban schools.” The liberal historian Alan Brinkley wrote that “black participants in this drama were angry too . . . their children were no more eager to attend school in South Boston or Charlestown than the South Boston kids were eager to attend school in Roxbury. Why did they have to suffer because of a policy formulated in the chambers of federal judges?”

Boston was boiling, and it was Ted Kennedy who had turned up the heat. It was Kennedyism writ large (the plan was the sort of hamfisted — and, naturally, doomed — federal interference in local problems that Kennedy had made his life’s work) and small: The judge in question, Arthur Garrity, who effectively took over Boston schools for 11 years, was a Kennedy family retainer who had worked on John Kennedy’s Senate and presidential campaigns.

“Teddy Kennedy more or less appointed him,” former Boston mayor Ray Flynn, who was then a representative from South Boston in the Massachusetts House, said in the Boston Globe this week. “Teddy Kennedy could have put the word in his ear to, you know, open this process up so people have an import — particularly parents — and I think that was the failing of Boston during that period in time.” Ted Kennedy’s biographer, Adam Clymer of The New York Times, agreed that Garrity “had tin ears about the practicalities.”

He wasn’t the only one. Teddy’s tin ear on what was happening in his own back yard was reminiscent of John Kennedy’s casual remark that he hadn’t learned about the Great Depression until he read about it at Harvard — even though he was born in 1917. Ted Kennedy had remained notably quiet on the issue of busing, hoping the whole thing would go away and that no one would notice his fingerprints on it. But as the school year opened, and Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle implored him, “you have the one voice that can help keep this city calm,” he dropped in to visit some schools. He agreed to speak to a vehemently anti-busing group that was holding a rally.

The protesters were not just Kennedy’s constituency; they were the dead center of it, working-class Irish Catholics who “helped build the Kennedy dynasty . . . Many continued to hang Jack’s picture in their living rooms,” wrote Peter Canellos in his bio, “Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy.” The crowd jeered Kennedy for about five minutes, then many turned their backs and began singing, “God Bless America.” That was too much for Ted. Without speaking, he walked away.

His decision to flee infuriated the crowd further. He was pelted with tomatoes as “he took refuge in the federal building named after his brother,” Micklethwait and Woolridge dryly note.

The symbolism was perfect. Here was a man who said he spoke for the people proving himself literally unable to speak to the people. Here was a man who argued that government was the citizens’ shelter, using a government building as a fortress against the hoi polloi. That he literally took cover under his brother’s name was the topper.

Almost. The topper was this: Stung by his reception in Boston, Kennedy took off for his real constituents — wealthy liberal elites. That Saturday night he was in San Francisco, teasing the audience about the rumor that he was going to run for president in 1976. He joked that his presence there had nothing to do with California’s basket of electoral votes. Everyone laughed.

Boston wasn’t laughing, though. There were brawls in both black and white schools. And the busing experiment was an utter disaster. Parents simply moved to the suburbs or put their kids in private schools. After 11 years, the proportion of whites in Boston schools dropped from 65% to 28%. When Arthur Garrity died, Kennedy praised him as a consummate jurist.

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In the “Dream Shall Never Die” speech six years later, Kennedy presented himself as the defender of those who had ridiculed him in Boston. “Our cause has been, since the days of Thomas Jefferson, the cause of the common man and the common woman … Our commitment has been, since the days of Andrew Jackson, to all those he called ‘the humble members of society — the farmers, mechanics and laborers.’ On this foundation we have defined our values, refined our policies and refreshed our faith.”

This was supposed to be a concession speech, the end of his failed 1980 presidential run. But it’s all about Ted. Kennedy barely mentions his party’s incumbent, Jimmy Carter, referring to him only once in passing.

Though the speech is characterized by sweeping language and few specifics, Kennedyism here seems to boil down to high taxes, especially for the rich and corporations; civil rights; universal health insurance and cost controls for doctors and hospitals and — more vaguely — sacrifices that are “shared fairly;” a nonspecific secular “faith,” seemingly in the ability of government to help people. Perhaps the strongest message is an exhortation that the people be “ready to give back to our country for all it has given us.”

Since Kennedy simply did not mention the military or defense or even foreign policy (bear in mind that the hostages were still being held in Iran, the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan and Europe was festooned with Soviet nuclear missiles), all of these must be considered low priorities of Ted Kennedyism, if they were priorities at all. Two years later he would introduce a “nuclear freeze” bill that even Jimmy Carter would have opposed because it would have frozen in place the massive Soviet advantage in weaponry — even if the Soviets didn’t cheat by continuing to add to their stockpiles.

The speech is a handy summary of liberalism. But in many cases it stands for the opposite of what another liberal icon, John Kennedy, stood for, and in other cases it is self-contradictory, foolhardy or sharply rebuked by history. Take full employment, a stated policy of Ted Kennedyism. He called for “jobs for all who are out of work,” explaining that employment was a fundamental right. His failure to explain how this was to occur called to mind “Camelot” — not the administration, the song, from the Broadway show of the same name, in which King Arthur boasts (as his kingdom is about to begin its collapse), “A law was made a distant moon ago here/July and August cannot be too hot/And there’s a legal limit to the snow here/In Camelot.”

Other lessons of Camelot — the administration, not the song — were lost on Ted Kennedy. Ted Kennedy never met a tax cut he didn’t try to block, nor a tax hike that he didn’t love. In the 1980 speech, with the country aching for tax relief, he instead denounced the Republican plan to decrease tax rates across the board and suggested raising the tax burden of corporations and wealthy individuals by closing tax loopholes and ending the deductibility of “business lunches that are nothing more than food stamps for the rich.”

Yet JFK was a tax cutter. Much to Ted’s chagrin, Ronald Reagan loved to remind Americans of JFK’s remark that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” JFK inherited a tax structure in which the top rate was an astonishing 91%. He proposed an across-the-board cut, starting by lowering that top range to 65%, and a reduction in corporate taxes. Sen. Al Gore (father of the 1990s vice president) cried that JFK’s program was a giveaway to the rich that would starve government of the ability to pay for public works projects — the same arguments Ted Kennedy would later make.

A favorite ploy of liberals is, knowing that spending will never be cut, to claim they’d support tax cuts if only spending were reduced first, so as to avoid deficits. JFK took the opposite line in 1962, saying that high taxation “siphons out of the private economy too large a share of personal and business purchasing power.”

It is true that the Kennedys can claim much credit for Medicare, originally proposed by JFK (it wasn’t passed till after his death) and staunchly supported by Ted Kennedy thereafter. Few Americans can imagine a country without it. But it’s just as hard to imagine a country with a top tax rate of 91%. Ted Kennedy spent his career trying to reverse the rising tide unleashed by his brother.

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One expenditure JFK loved was defense, which he ramped up to nearly 50% of the federal budget. Ted Kennedy would later say his proudest vote was against the Iraq War in 2002. Yet the Kennedys were wrong both on the Vietnam War, American involvement in which JFK started, and Desert Storm, which Ted voted against despite the massive UN-backed multinational coalition assembled by George H.W. Bush. And even if the Iraq War was mismanaged, Ted Kennedy’s vote to essentially declare the war lost and remove all troops by March of 2007, before the surge took effect, would not have pleased his brother.

Might JFK, who seemed eager to start a war with somebody from the moment he took office and vowed “that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty . . . To those peoples in the huts and villages across the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required — not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right.” Cue napalm and The Doors.

Ted Kennedy would call Vietnam “a monstrous outrage” in 1968. He got that one right.

Would John Kennedy have withdrawn from Vietnam? We’ll never know. On his final flight to Texas, he quietly ordered 1,000 troops to be sent home. But even JFK’s friend and aide Arthur Schlesinger wrote in “The Cycles of American History,” “Though he privately thought the United States ‘overcommitted’ in Southeast Asia, he permitted the commitment to grow. It was the fatal error of his presidency.”

JFK had discussed withdrawing “after I’m re-elected,” but feared that “we would have another Joe McCarthy scare on our hands” if he tried to do so any earlier. If he was there purely to win votes, the Vietnam misadventure was not just stupid, it was wrong. And who is to say that after his re-election, he would not have put off withdrawal till after the midterm elections, or until after RFK was comfortably installed as his successor in the White House? Stopping something you think is to your political advantage is like dieting. It’s never a good day to start.

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If Ted Kennedy was, in President Obama’s words, the “greatest senator of our time,” then John Kennedy cannot have been a great or even a good president. Can you imagine Ted saying, as President Kennedy once did, “Life is unfair”? JFK was speaking in 1962, about reservists whom (shades of George W. Bush) he had forced to stay on active duty after their terms would normally have ended.

Can you imagine Ted Kennedy voting for, much less appointing, as conservative a Supreme Court justice as Byron White, who opposed the liberal rulings in both the Miranda case and in Roe v. Wade? John Kennedyism was a moderate liberalism meant to appeal nationwide; Ted Kennedyism was a regional brand tailored to the Northeast and on the West Coast. Liberals might want to keep that in mind as they mull whether to name the pending health care legislation after someone who, when the eulogies end, will be remembered as a polarizing figure.

The most curious section of the “Dream Shall Never Die” speech is Ted Kennedy’s defense of deregulation in the airline and trucking industry. “We restored competition to the marketplace,” Kennedy said, and he was right. But if deregulation was a good idea in the airline and trucking industry, why wasn’t it a valid principle in general? Why didn’t he support the many efforts in Congress to repeal, for instance, the New Deal’s absurd Davis-Bacon Act, which mandated superminimum wages, dictated by unions, that drove up the price of public works projects and thus cost all taxpayers? It was a case of a special interest group with deep pockets and political connections against everyone else. Kennedy took his usual side.

Ted Kennedy is rightly credited with mastery of Senate procedure, but it would be astonishing if a man who had the third-longest tenure ever couldn’t figure out how the place worked. And why did he enjoy 46 years in the Senate? Because despite being barely out of law school, he was elected at the minimum age, 30, to take over his brother’s seat, which the Kennedy family had velvet-roped off for him like a VIP lounge by designating a seat-warmer to take it for two years until Ted was eligible. When running for the Senate in 1959, John F. Kennedy said a prescient and startling thing: “Just as I went into politics because Joe died, if anything happened to me tomorrow, Bobby would run for my seat in the Senate. And if Bobby died, our young brother, Ted, would take over for him.”

In 46-plus years, Ted Kennedy did sponsor a lot of popular legislation, such as the Meals on Wheels program. He did important work to pass COBRA, which was a significant step toward portability of insurance, a problem that is still not fully solved.

And the Kennedys were responsible for notable advances in civil rights. Robert Kennedy was steadfast in defending James Meredith in his quest to become the first black student at Ole Miss. In 1965, Ted Kennedy would lead a fight to end the poll tax that was used to keep blacks from voting in the South removed. He failed, but the Supreme Court ended the poll tax the following year. During the 1963 Martin Luther King Jr.-led march on Birmingham, JFK declared, “a great change is at hand . . . our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful and constructive for all.” He paid with his approval rating, which dropped from 76% at the outset of 1963 to 59% shortly before his death in November.

But it was not the Kennedys who led the movement. It was King, the Freedom Riders and others on the ground in the South. The Kennedys got caught up in the whirlwind. Robert Kennedy, then attorney general, took the lead because John Kennedy wanted to distance himself from any political fallout (at which point he must have questioned the wisdom of appointing his own brother the head of national law enforcement).

JFK biographer Robert Dallek concluded in “An Unfinished Life” that, unlike Hubert Humphrey, whom Kennedy defeated in the 1960 Democratic primary, “Jack Kennedy’s response to the great civil rights debates of 1957-1960 was largely motivated by self-serving political considerations.” Of the Freedom Riders, a group that was attacked for trying to integrate bus lines in the south, JFK told his friend Harris Wofford, “Can’t you get your goddamned friends off those buses? Tell them to call it off!”

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Even when Kennedyism is right, it’s wrong. The obituaries this week were rightly full of praise for Ted’s role in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But that was an emergency measure that was due to expire in five years. The South was on fire and the federal government had to do something to put it out.

But Ted Kennedy and his followers kept going back to blast the scene with a fire extinguisher long after the ashes had turned cold, and doing the same with some places that never burned in the first place. Ted was instrumental in extending it, and extending it again — all the way to 2031. He did this not because he seriously believed Jim Crow was still alive, but to remind people of past glories, to shore up his image as a fighter for the downtrodden, and to keep alive the opportunity to Bork any opponent as racist.

Now we’re stuck with the Voting Rights Act, seemingly forever — a permanent, bizarre rule that all jurisdictions in nine states and some in seven others — including New Hampshire and California — can’t be trusted to so much as move a polling place from one side of the street to the other without Capitol Hill’s approval. What other federal laws apply to only a few handpicked states? (The Supreme Court this year partly upheld and partly restricted the Act, hinting that it might revisit the matter later.) In 1981 Kennedy kept saying, “We shall overcome” as he led that year’s battle to renew the act, making it clear that any opposition would be painted as racist. It worked.

Perhaps the purest aspect of Kennedyism, the one that never was watered down, was the centerpiece of both the 1980 speech and the 1960 inaugural address — that of urging individual sacrifice, by everyone, at all times, for the common good.

This may be the least controversial aspect of Kennedyism — Republicans and conservatives offer similar thoughts all the time. But it’s the most worrisome. “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country?” “In a less heady ambiance, people might have noticed that the famous formulation is totalitarian,” wrote Garry Wills in “Nixon Agonistes.” It subjects “the citizen to his government, not the government to man.”

Those who were actually listening to this “vapor” of “self-hypnosis,” as Wills called it, might well have concluded that “songs about what you can do for your country end up meaning ‘what your country can do to you.'”