Obama: ‘No One Made the Senate Come Alive like Ted Kennedy’

Here’s one photo you probably won’t see in the Ted Kennedy Memorial Library that opens today #TedKennedy #maryjo pic.twitter.com/oMlwkFRLYu

— Tribiggs (@tribiggs) March 30, 2015

This has to be yet another troll by the Troller-in-Chief, right? In addition to paying back Teddy, who helped launch Obama’s presidential bid by declaring him 2008’s second coming of JFK*:

President Barack Obama paid tribute to the late Sen. Ted Kennedy at the dedication of his political institute in Boston on Monday, praising the Democratic lawmaker’s legacy and that of his brother as “alive as ever.”

“No one made the Senate come alive like Ted Kennedy,” Obama told a crowd of Massachusetts dignitaries. “It was one of the great pleasures of my life to hear Ted Kennedy deliver one of his stemwinders on the floor.”

“What if we carried ourselves more like Ted Kennedy? What if we worked to follow his example a little bit harder?” Obama asked.

“Carried ourselves” like Ted Kennedy? Say what you will about the man, but one of Obama’s virtues is that he doesn’t appear to make half-gallons of Chivas Regal disappear in a single gulp. But as far as Obama and working the senate, this is of course the man who typically voted “present” in the Illinois state legislature, and who made “less than a quarter of Senate votes” in 2007, as CNN reported, before perfecting the art of using Air Force One to commute to the links.

Since her name isn’t mentioned in the above Politico article, it’s always worth flashing back to the infamous 2003 passage from Charles Pierce, now with Esquire, on Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne:

“If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age.”

—Charles Pierce in a January 5, 2003 Boston Globe Magazine article. Kopechne drowned while trapped in Kennedy’s submerged car off Chappaquiddick Island in July 1969, an accident Kennedy did not report for several hours.

(Kennedy himself was said to enjoy Kopechne jokes in his dotage.) And speaking of Kennedy’s relationship with women after her:

Remembering Ted Kennedy, warrior for gender equality http://t.co/xAp5YbY8nT pic.twitter.com/TC73pw9jqH

— Lachlan Markay (@lachlan) March 30, 2015

* There’s one in every Democrat presidential crowd. This year’s nominee? Martin O’Malley. Funny  though, with the arguable exception of Bill Clinton (and only after he had a GOP Congress), they never govern like JFK if they actually win.