Reading Senator Kennedy’s remarks Wednesday at the National Press Club in Washington is a sad thing. He was once, after all, a vital figure, heir to the president who spoke for a new generation and articulated with elan a route forward for the party, inspiring his countrymen to go anywhere, pay any price in the cause of freedom. Now the last of the line, who has long since turned on his brother in foreign affairs, is citing the old party litany as if by rote, and without effect, and in a fashion that is almost disconnected from the political signals being sent by the voters.

In an era when there is bold talk of reforming Social Security, when the investor class now composes more than 50% of the population, when President Bush is proposing to allow workers to divert a portion of their payroll tax toward IRA-like accounts, here is the man whose party once spoke of the future, saying “I reject the deceptive and dangerous claim that the outcome last November was somehow a sweeping, or a modest, or even a miniature mandate for reactionary measures like privatizing Social Security.”

After voters have rejected even his party’s soft-nationalization of health care, Mr. Kennedy unveiled his “Medicare for All” plan. While Mr. Kerry stopped short of advocating universal health coverage during his campaign – coverage would have been for those “who were interested” – Mr. Kennedy insisted the government should cover all Americans (even those who prefer private coverage). “Administrative costs are low,” he said. “Patients’ satisfaction is high. “Certainly he couldn’t have been referring the same Medicare system that not long from now will begin incurring debt on a massive scale? Republicans, it was preemptively warned, will slander his plan as “socialized medicine.” Socialized medicine? Perhaps. Illogical policy, quite certainly. Mr. Kennedy’s plan to increase benefactors would merely amplify this instability.

It wasn’t just his disconnected turn to the left that was so sad but also his famous inability to heed the risk of irony – in one breath he says, “[Republicans] exploit the politics of fear and division… and have consciously chosen negative policies that diminish the American dream,” and the next, ‘Democrats are the party of “hope and unity.” ‘ And in the same week that a figurehead of the ’60s liberal establishment, Dan Rather, suffered his coup de grace – as well as the same political season where not one or two, but three formerly anti-democratic Middle Eastern countries are undergoing democratic elections – Mr. Kennedy pipes up, proclaiming that Iraq is “Mr. Bush’s Vietnam quagmire.”

Mr. Kennedy’s initiative wish list – free college for all, better public transportation, implementing Kyoto, universally mandating at least seven sick days, increased minimum wage – sounded as a eternal list of party favors. It was as if he were detached from what is happening in the broad land, where, under the auspices of the ‘ownership society,’ Americans are resoundingly embracing Mr. Bush’s intentions of handing the controls of governmental programs over to citizens’ hands. What was heard at the press club was the beginning of what no doubt will be a long swan song of a dying ideology.