"major enemy" ? It amazes me how people take partinship and public record at face value.
Okay let me spell it out. Kennedy got this award because he's bonded with a GW who is in awe of the Camelot mystique and feels a kinship over being a second generation politician. The award was a mutual expression of Kennedy worship that's only become a problem since Kennedy went out and raked GW over the coals...then again, with an election on the way, it doesn't hurt for the Kennedy's to reclaim their "enemy" role. I read GW was going to do this nearly a year ago.
Barbara Bush was on Larry King trying to play it off like some committee made the pick without them having anything to do with it.... but elder Bush didn't decide on the recepiant without months of previous planning. I'll say it again, GW has had an open door policy for Kennedy to talk his ear off in a way no other Democrat has...and it's no secret. To think this is a move for Sr. to undermine Jr. is just wishfull thinking.
This excerpt from the Boston Globe:
"Another Democratic official said that while Kennedy has aided the president's attempts to pass a prescription drug benefit for Medicare, the relationship is no longer warm, largely as a result of the war and the heated rhetoric since. Kennedy voted against the resolution authorizing the use of military force against Iraq."
"When Bush first came into office, he and Kennedy spoke several times, and Bush even invited some members of the Kennedy family to the White House to watch a movie. They discussed the longstanding ties between their families, and seemed to relate to each other as members of two leading political dynasties. In the year that followed, the two men toured the country together touting their work together on the No Child Left Behind education bill, and in November 2001, Bush renamed the Department of Justice after Kennedy's brother Robert, the former attorney general who was assassinated during the presidential primaries in 1968.
But the relationship began to slide, especially as the administration declined to fund the education bill as much as Kennedy wanted, and interpreted the bill differently than he had expected. When Bush said that John F. Kennedy would have supported his tax cut, the senator and other Kennedy relatives pushed back, angrily declaring that unlike the Bush tax cut, the tax cut in President Kennedy's administration went mostly to the poor and working class."
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http://www.boston.com/news/nation/wa...over_iraq_war/
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