The People's Champion?

Alexander Cockburn doesn't think so:

While Teddy Kennedy's disasters were vivid, his legislative triumphs, draped in this week's obituaries with respectful homage, were far less colourful. And they were actually devastating for the very constituencies – working people, organised labour – whose champion he claimed to be.

He had the most famous car accident in political history when he drove off a wooden bridge on Chappaquiddick Island in July 1969, saying later that he had failed in several attempts to dive down 10ft to rescue Mary Jo Kopechne, a former aide of his dead brother Robert. She was in the back seat and drowned.

Ted quit the scene and called a Kennedy speechwriter instead of the police, a misdemeanor which cost him a two-month suspended sentence and any chance of ever following his brother Jack into the White House.

He made only one overt bid for the presidency and that was a colourful disaster too. He challenged the Democratic incumbent, Jimmy Carter, then seeking re-election in 1980. After three years, the left in the Democratic Party was bitterly disappointed in Carter's cautious centrism and Kennedy placed himself in the left's vanguard, declaring in a famous speech that "sometimes a party must sail against the wind".

In those days I was reporting on national politics for the Village Voice and Rolling Stone and covered Kennedy's bid. It got off to a shaky start when Roger Mudd of NBC, a well-known political reporter and TV newscaster, asked Ted on prime time why he wanted to be president. The 30 seconds of silence that followed this easy lob didn't help Kennedy's chances.

The campaign plane shot backwards and forwards across America, seeking photo opportunities. On one typical morning we left Washington DC at 6am and headed for the rustbelt where Kennedy stood outside a shuttered Pittsburgh steel mill and pledged to get the steel industry back on its feet. We shot west to Nebraska so Kennedy could stand outside a corn silo and swear allegiance to the cause – utterly doomed - of the small family farmer. Then we doubled back to New York so he could stand on a street corner in a slum neighbourhood in the Bronx and promise a better deal for urban blacks and Hispanics.

I asked one of Kennedy's campaign people why they didn't simply equip a studio in Washington with the necessary backdrops – steel mill, silo, urban wasteland – but he said it wouldn't be honest. As things were, the locations we flew to may have been genuine, but the campaign pledges were as dishonest as a studio backdrop, which is why Kennedy – bellowing out his speeches like a mammoth stuck in a swamp - sounded utterly fake.

By 1980 the die was cast. Disdaining the left option offered by George McGovern in 1972, the Democratic Party had thrown in its lot decisively with Wall Street and the big players across the American corporate landscape. The labour unions and the other foot-soldier constituencies of the party would be flung empty rhetorical bouquets, as they have been every four years since 1980.

Though the obituarists have glowingly related Kennedy's 46-year stint in the US Senate and, as 'the last liberal', his mastery of the legislative process, they miss the fact that it was out of Kennedy's Senate office that came two momentous bits of legislation that signalled the onset of the neo-liberal era: deregulation of trucking and aviation. They were a disaster for organised labour and the working conditions and pay of people in those industries.

The theorist of deregulation was Stephen Breyer who was Kennedy's chief counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Breyer now sits on the US Supreme Court, an unswerving shill for the corporate sector.

We also have Kennedy to thank for 'No Child Left Behind' – a nightmarish Education Bill pushed through in concert with Bush Jr's White House, that condemns children to a treadmill of endless tests contrived as "national standards".

And it was Kennedy who was the prime force behind the Hate Crimes Bill, aka the Matthew Shepard Act, by dint of which America is well on its way to making it illegal to say anything nasty about gays, Jews, blacks and women. "Hate speech," far short of any direct incitement to violence, is on the edge of being criminalised, with the First Amendment gone the way of the dodo.

Of course Kennedy did some decent things, which is scarcely surprising in a political career of half a century. But as much as his brothers Jack and Bobby he was adept at persuading the underdogs that he was on their side.

To this day there are deluded souls who argue that Jack was going to pull US troops out of Vietnam and that is why he was killed; that Bobby, who supervised the US "Murder Inc" in the Caribbean, was really and truly on the side of the angels; that Ted was the mighty champion of the working people, even though he gave them deregulation and helped push through NAFTA, the "free trade" pact that was another body blow to American labour.

By his crucial endorsement last year he helped give them Obama too, now holidaying six miles from Chappaquiddick, on Martha's Vineyard. But because his mishaps were so dramatic, no one remembers quite how noxious his political triumphs were for those who now mourn him as their lost leader.