Obama: "What If We Carried Ourselves More Like Ted Kennedy?"

President Obama speaks affectionately of deceased Sen. Ted Kennedy at the dedication of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the U.S. Senate in Boston on Monday.





PRESIDENT OBAMA: Now since this is a joyous occasion, this is not the time for me to suggest a slew of new ideas for reform. Although, I do have some. Maybe I'll just mention one. What if we carried ourselves more like Ted Kennedy? What if we worked to follow his example a little bit harder?



To his harshest critics, who saw him as nothing more than a partisan lightning rod, that may sound foolish, but there are Republicans here today for a reason. They know who Ted Kennedy was. It's not because they shared Ted's ideology or his positions, but because they knew Ted as somebody who bridged the partisan divide over and over and over again with genuine effort and affection in an era where bipartisanship has become so very rare. They knew him as somebody who kept his word.