A New Man

WASHINGTON — He bounds out of bed at 6 every morning, eager to attack his treadmill. He arrives at his Senate office hours ahead of most of his colleagues, huddling with aides to plot political strategy. With newfound zeal and with considerable success, he prods and pushes and cajoles fellow Democrats to support his legislative obsessions.

In a remarkable display of political and personal renewal, Edward M. Kennedy is suddenly back at the top of his form.

Two years ago, he was a wreck: tired, bloated and on the brink of losing the Massachusetts Senate seat he had held for 30 years. Now, fit and focused, he is giving Senate Republicans--especially Majority Leader Bob Dole--an unexpected drubbing at what was supposed to be the height of the GOP revolution.

“He’s aggravating a number of Republicans no end--and he relishes that,” said Sen. Nancy Kassebaum, a Kansas Republican who is working closely with Kennedy on health reform. In particular, she said, Dole “doesn’t like it at all.”

For weeks, Kennedy has had Dole turning legislative back flips to avoid votes on the politically potent issue of increasing the minimum wage. But Kennedy is no mere liberal heckler. As co-sponsor or lead Democrat on two of this year’s major pieces of legislation, he has been more prominent on the Senate floor over the past weeks than any other senator.

He shepherded to Senate passage a health reform bill that would guarantee workers the ability to take their health insurance with them when they switch jobs. And when the Republicans pushed to pass a bill to curb illegal immigration, it was Kennedy who successfully led the effort to block provisions that he and his fellow Democrats considered too harsh.

Kennedy’s renaissance, which is helping to propel a new Democratic offensive after the Republican takeover left the party shellshocked, reflects no small amount of his own persistence and perspiration, colleagues and others close to him said.

With what he calls the “inspiration” of his wife, Vicki, whom he married in 1992, he launched into a new routine this year: going to bed early, eating better and waking (without an alarm) at 6 to take on the treadmill.

“Basically I’m sort of back in shape or getting there,” Kennedy said. He balks at revealing how many pounds he has shed, saying only: “Enough for now, but we’ve still got a ways to go. We’re on schedule.”

The impact on his work has been considerable. “I think I’m more alert and able to put in long days and be more effective,” the 64-year-old senator said.

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Kennedy’s resurgence is all the more remarkable given how low he had sunk at the outset of his hotly contested 1994 campaign.

Then, his very tenure in the Senate was threatened. Overweight and under-performing, he seemed to epitomize the political careerism that had become the object of many voters’ frustration with Washington. Making matters worse, his image had been tarnished by his entanglement in the Palm Beach rape trial of his nephew, William Kennedy Smith (who was acquitted).

Despite his reelection in 1994, Kennedy remained puffy and perilously out of shape. But recently the excess flesh has melted off his face, revealing again the famous Kennedy jawline. His suits, which strained to contain his bulk last autumn, fit again. His coloring, which turned a sickly crimson during heated debates last year, has toned down several shades.

Sitting in a maroon wingback chair in his Capitol Hill office, Kennedy self-consciously described his struggle with the scales--the consumption of “too much ice cream, doughnuts and that sort of thing” during the 1994 campaign.

“He knows he’s at the top of his game,” said Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.). “He’s doing what he truly believes in and he’s having fun doing it. He’s jocular and relaxed, and physically I think he’s feeling better. I think those changes reflect the influence his wife, Vicki, has had on him.”

Kennedy’s personal renewal has contributed to a resurgence of Senate Democrats, who lost their majority in the 1994 elections and seemed bewildered and impotent through much of 1995.

This year, by putting forward a legislative agenda designed to address the economic insecurities that emerged as a key issue in the Republican primaries, Democrats have managed to gain momentum for the first time in more than a year. And Kennedy, as much as anyone, is leading the charge.

His friends and rivals agree that the insecurity issue, which maverick Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan exploited during the primary election season, plays to Kennedy’s strengths. For decades he has been crafting legislative remedies for working peoples’ anxieties about health care, education, job security and pensions.

“The elevation of these issues and the fact that the Republican campaign for the presidency is in the forum of the United States Senate has heightened the interest in and the focus on these issues,” Kennedy said. “That works to our advantage.”

Kassebaum said Kennedy’s rising political fortunes caught her by surprise because she believed the public was squarely behind the GOP drive to diminish the cost and scope of the federal government. She credits the Democrats in general and Kennedy in particular with making the most of the opportunity Buchanan gave them by heightening awareness of Americans’ economic anxiety.

“It was an issue that fit really well for Sen. Kennedy,” Kassebaum said. “I’m sure Pat Buchanan would be just horrified to know that he helped Kennedy.”

Kennedy attributes today’s anxieties to what he calls the “silent recession.” Time after time during his tough race in 1994, he said, working Americans told him that the growing gap between the rich and the poor had denied them the benefits of the improving national economy.

Finding himself in the minority and having lost his position as chairman of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee, Kennedy sought out sympathetic Republicans such as Kassebaum to support legislation to help the middle class.

“Some [of my colleagues] just like to flyspeck the majority,” Kennedy said. “I like to get things done as well as stake out principled positions.”

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The crowning achievement was Senate passage of the Kassebaum-Kennedy health reform bill, which would guarantee that insurance companies could not shut out workers who left their jobs or lost them.

Kassebaum said she had not always been eager to collaborate with Kennedy, who is one of the Senate’s fiercest partisans. Years ago, she recalled, she rejected Kennedy’s bid for support on a piece of legislation, telling him: “Working with you in Kansas is as bad as working with the Wicked Witch of the East.”

Yet work together is exactly what they did on the health reform bill--first by pressuring Dole into scheduling debate on the measure, and then by defeating his effort to include tax-deferred medical savings accounts, which would work like individual retirement accounts for medical expenses.

Originally, Kassebaum had supported the savings accounts, but Kennedy persuaded her and four other Republicans that attaching them to the bill would lead inevitably to a veto by President Clinton. For Dole, whose presidential campaign is based in large measure on his legislative skills, the defeat on medical savings accounts was particularly painful.

After the Senate passed the health bill unanimously, Kennedy played a similar role in guiding a sweeping immigration measure through the Senate last week.

As the Democratic floor manager on the measure, he ensured that it stayed clean of provisions objectionable to himself and other Democrats. In the end, the Senate vote for the bill was 97 to 3.

The real story of the immigration bill, though, was Kennedy’s dogged effort to force the Senate to vote on his main legislative preoccupation--increasing the minimum wage from $4.25 now to $5.15 in two steps of 45 cents a year.

Dole dodged Kennedy’s effort to force a vote on the minimum wage as a rider on the immigration bill. But the parliamentary maneuvering required to do so consumed nearly 52 hours over most of two weeks, on a bill most observers thought would take two days.

For weeks, Kennedy had plagued Dole with legislative attacks aimed at forcing a vote on increasing the minimum wage, an initiative supported by most Americans.

On May 2, when Senate Democrats met for their weekly lunch, Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota hailed Kennedy’s efforts on the issue; the group gave him a resounding round of applause. And during a news conference May 3, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) praised Kennedy’s tenacity, saying he has “led the fight in the Senate with a passion I’ve rarely seen in my 22 years here.”

Kennedy will probably get his Senate vote on the minimum wage before long. House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said Sunday that he and Dole would schedule a vote probably as an amendment to a welfare reform bill.

The Clinton administration, which had failed to bring the minimum wage to the congressional front burner for more than a year, is grateful to Kennedy.

“The sand was slipping through our hands for months and [Kennedy] finally put the minimum wage on the map,” said Scott Southerland, spokesman for the Labor Department. “He’s a metaphor for the Democratic revival--the guy is just everywhere.

“And his personal appearance and attitude are night and day from two years ago,” he added. “He seems to be relishing the battle.”

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The Democrats’ recent gains would not be possible, Daschle conceded, were it not for the vacuum Republicans have left as they try to regroup after bruising defeats on the budget and as Dole attempts to develop a GOP vision that responds to America’s cries for economic security.

“Kennedy recognizes that there’s a void to fill and he’s one of the few people who has the capacity to fill the void,” Daschle said. “In terms of this [economic security] agenda, he brings so much credibility and energy to the debate.”

His position at the front of the Democratic offensive is likely to continue through the November elections. Earlier this spring, Daschle outlined Senate Democrats’ priorities for the rest of the year: income security, health security and retirement security. In each case, Kennedy is the Democrats’ leader.

Unlike many other Democrats, Kennedy did not take the lesson from the 1994 elections that the age of liberalism was dead and that Democrats had to become watered-down Republicans if they wanted to regain power.

In a major address early this year, he outlined his detailed legislative strategy for addressing the economic insecurity issue. “If we do not respond to this quiet depression, if we do not stand up now for the people we are supposed to represent,” Kennedy said, “then as Democrats we will not deserve our name, our history or the people’s continuing confidence.”

Several days later, President Clinton sent him a birthday card that is prominently displayed in the anteroom to his office. In a handwritten note, Clinton wrote: “Thanks for your friendship and for not losing heart this year when so many did.”