The lines are hardening by the day, and you have to wonder who, if anyone, will be able to broker the kind of compromises that Kennedy once was able to hammer out, whether he was working with President George W. Bush on No Child Left Behind or with McCain on immigration reform. Even if those efforts didn't end entirely in success - immigration reform remains an even hotter political button than health care reform - at this point, any bipartisan efforts seem like a bit of a victory.
Instead, we are at the point that even talking, let alone walking, across the aisle is viewed in some quarters as treasonous. A county GOP official in Iowa was able to draw cheers at a recent town hall meeting by demanding that his senator, Charles Grassley, a Republican, drop out of bipartisan talks with colleagues, the so-called Gang of Six, who are trying to develop a health care bill in the Senate.
"I have a great deal of concern with your continuing to negotiate," the county chairman said, according to a Bloomberg News report. This to a senator who already seems to come up with daily deal-breakers for any health care bill - it can't have a public option, it can't have end-of-life counseling, it should have not just 51 but 80 of 100 Senate votes.
One man's passing in and of itself is never the end of an entire era, and yet it is sometimes only after the death of someone as looming on the landscape as Kennedy that there is pause to consider just how much that landscape had been changing all along.
The clubby, collegial Senate that he came to symbolize no doubt died before he did. And it wasn't just the Senate, but everything about politics - the way politics is practiced, covered by the media and followed by the public.
You have to wonder what it was like to serve over a span of time that encompassed so much change, from a time when it was a largely patrician institution, to now, when the heated debates on the Internet and cable news and talk radio tend to outshout those of the so-called greatest deliberative body in the world.
And you have to wonder what it was like for Kennedy in particular to live long enough to "comb gray hair," as he once quoted an Irish poet - during a eulogy for yet another Kennedy, JFK Jr., who died dark-haired.
His own was a messy, complicated life, one not easily placed in the good-or-evil, utter-failure-or-total-triumph, one-or-the-other categories that we use as instant score cards these days.
It's ironic, but we've heard more about how great compromise is these last few days in regard to the late legislator than to the current health care legislation. Any sign of moving toward the middle in the health care debate from either the left or the right, is viewed as caving in rather an attempt to compromise.
Perhaps that will be one of Kennedy's legacies - to restore the idea that to compromise is, well, compromising.
