Leadership is talking about issues that aren't even issues yet.

Senator Kennedy was, as a better educated era would have described him, a man of parts. He seemed to hew to Presidents Roosevelt and Kennedy's view that noblesse oblige lets one champion the poor while still indulging one's personal peccadilloes on the side. Senator Kennedy's "Robert Bork's America" speech was surely one of the low points of his legislative career, and as incendiary to the left as the birthers/deathers/penisers' town hall mobs are to the right today.

But to his credit, when he thought something was right, he said so, which is how he came out for gay rights in 1972.