Peter Kanellis
speaker
250 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 26 May
Peter Kanellis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So even bills that other senators were credited with or pushed through, for example, the Americans with Disabilities Act that Tom Harkin had played a lead role in, these bills were largely crafted and refined through Kennedy's office.
And I think that he developed a sort of ability to kind of set the national agenda, even if he himself were not the Democratic leader.
And even if there were other senators whose names were sort of more prominently put on the bill.
So I would say, you know, really from the 1970s until the first decade of the new millennium, Senator Kennedy was the driving force behind most of the policy changes in America.
Yes, I think that he became more effective as he abandoned his ambitions.
You know, it was really around 1988 that he sort of sunk into him that he would never be president.
And I think it was a tremendous relief because it allowed him to concentrate on doing what he did best, building coalitions.
Again, there's so many misperceptions of Ted Kennedy that are out there.
One of them is that he was such a bitter partisan that people must have hated him, but actually not true.
He had...
many close friends among Republicans.
And he was very, very dedicated to the nuts and bolts of legislating, which meant building coalitions, working closely with people who disagreed even fundamentally on many of the issues that he cared about, but finding that one thread of agreement that could lead to a deal.
And I think even the people who would criticize Senator Kennedy would say that, you know, sometimes he wanted a deal more than he should have.
You know, there's some people who criticized him for collaborating with George W. Bush on No Child Left Behind.
But I think Kennedy had a keen sense that once you established a sort of legislative framework to move an issue forward, it was sort of
permanently on the map it was sort of an innate sense of politics that if you if you build it eventually they will come and that was certainly his approach to health care and his approach to civil rights it was his approach to immigration and other areas believing that you know the long arc of history will uh will turn in his direction that is to say the liberal direction
Well, the Kennedys were different from some of the other political dynasties we have.
I think one of the reasons we have a lot of political dynasties now is simply fundraising.
You talk about the Bush dynasty.
The reason that members of the Bush family would have a leg up on other politicians was because of the massive fundraising list that George and Barbara Bush Sr.
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