The senator for volunteering

77 year-old Edward Kennedy, who died on August 25 after a long battle against cancer, which didn’t stop him from continuing a fight for the two causes closest to his heart and which President Obama had elected political priorities: an ambitious and organised plan for national civil service and health reform.

The first became reality last April, when the President of the United-States signed the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act: the bipartisan law which the Massachussetts Democrat Senator had thought up with his friend and colleague Republican Orrin Hatch.  The law aims at tripling funds and the number of participants in the national American civil service and created ad hoc volunteering programmes for every society group: students, women, old age pensioners, war veterans. 

Obama had symbolically chosen to transform the Act into Law within the first 100 days of his presidency, reminding the people that Edward was the second Kennedy to have asked the American people to look to helping others.

The first was his brother John, the President assassinated in Dallas, who founded Peace Corps and whose famed mantra was “ask yourself what you can do for your country,” and through these words inciting a whole generation to put themselves at the service of others.  

Edward, the Kennedy political reference for around four decades, as well as that of the Democratic party, was not new at pushing forward revolutionary laws with great social impacts.  His signature can be found on the No Child Left Behind programme, launched in 2001 by the Bush administration; and before that in 1997 on the State Children Health Insurance which guarantees medical assistance to children of low-income backgrounds. 

Universal health care was a continuous fight during his 46 years as senator.  He was on Hillary and Bill Clinton’s sides when they tried to pass the health reforms, and last July 15 it was the Committee of Work, Health and Education which he presides over to give the approval to the reform proposal debated upon today in Capitol Hill.  Edward would have liked to see it become law.