Ted Kennedy's America ... and How We got Here

Jonah Goldberg

If you think American politics have gotten nastier, crueler, and more symbolic over the last 20 years, blame Ted Kennedy.

This month marks the 20th anniversary of the borking of Judge Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan’s failed Supreme Court nominee. And it was Ted Kennedy’s bilious bugle blast that brought the man down. Almost immediately after Reagan nominated Bork, Kennedy pulled himself off his barstool and proclaimed: “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of the government ...”

Kennedy’s assault rallied left-wing interest groups to the anti-Bork banner for an unprecedented assault on a man the late Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger dubbed the most qualified nominee he’d seen in his professional lifetime. As Gary McDowell noted recently in the Wall Street Journal, that time span included the careers of Benjamin Cardozo, Hugo Black, and Felix Frankfurter.
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In 1991, Bush nominated Clarence Thomas for the high court, and Democrats attempted to replay their Bork triumph and likewise destroy Thomas. But Thomas would not be goaded into the meat grinder. This remains the outrage according to liberals today: He refused to go quietly into the night.

In 1992, Bill Clinton introduced the phrase “the politics of personal destruction” to the lexicon. Clinton used it preemptively to delegitimize scrutiny of his private life. After all, the accusations against Thomas — he allegedly asked a subordinate out on a date; he joked about a pubic hair — were of Disneyesque innocence compared with almost every Saturday night in Little Rock for Clinton. In a world where the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill standard was held consistently, Clinton would not have been qualified to be a tollbooth attendant on the New Jersey Turnpike. Hence, he called for an end to the ratcheting up of the gotcha game before he himself got got.

But it didn’t work. His private life spilled out for public viewing, steaming in the cold air.

Liberals were outraged, sometimes fairly, often not. But they felt they needed to respond tone for tone, blow for blow. They scoured the private lives of Clinton’s “tormentors” for dirt, and they often found it.

There’s more, of course. The Florida recount saw Republicans feeling justified to do whatever it took — even fight like Democrats — to win. The recount, in turn, laid the foundation of bitterness and bile that fuels the omnivorous banshees of the “netroots,” who proudly proclaim they care only about winning and being as ruthless as they imagine the Republicans are.

But at this point you know the story. In Ted Kennedy’s America, it’s blow for blow and eye for eye now, and everyone is blind to how we got here.