Sanctify the middle ground

I once had the opportunity to serve as special counsel to Sen. Edward Kennedy’s Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources. What impressed me most about his legislative leadership was his ability to forge bipartisan legislative solutions to difficult issues. In his distinguished career, he never forgot that the best legislation reflects the public interest. His career-long belief that decent quality health care was a right for all Americans is now within reach. Yet cancer, the issue that he and Sen. Warren Magnuson were determined to conquer through research, took him.

Nothing would better honor his memory than for the strident partisans on all sides of health reform to observe a moment of silence for the greatest legislator in Senate history. Let’s then proceed to finding the middle ground in this debate that Sen. Kennedy would certainly have sought had not death quieted his great voice.

A truly historic American has passed from the scene, but as he himself would have observed, the dream endures, and the cause will never die.

Tom Keefe

Spokane