Obama Calls for Bipartisanship: ‘Get Something Done’

The White House(BOSTON) — President Obama made a passionate appeal for bipartisanship and civility at the dedication of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate in Boston Monday.

“We live in a time of such great cynicism,” Obama said. “What if we carried ourselves more like Ted Kennedy?”

“Ted understood that the only point of running for office was to get something done. Not to posture. Not to sit there worrying about the next election or the polls. To take risk,” the president said of the former Massachusetts senator, who died of brain cancer in 2009 after serving almost 47 years in the Senate.

“There are Republicans here today for a reason,” Obama said. “Because they knew Ted as somebody who bridged the partisan divide over and over and over. They knew him as somebody who kept his word.”

The U.S. Senate is “a more diverse, more accurate reflection of America than it used to be and that is a grand thing, a great achievement. But Ted grieved the loss of comradery and collegiality, the face-to-face interaction. I think he’d regret it, the arguments now made to cameras rather than colleagues, directed to a narrow base instead of the body politic as a whole…It leads more Americans to turn away in disgust and simply choose not to exercise their right to vote,” the president said.

Obama told the audience he and the first lady had been praying for Officer John Moynihan, the Boston police officer shot on Saturday. Moynihan was formerly honored at the White House as one of the nation’s “Top Cops.”

The president also alluded briefly to the Iran negotiations, quoting President John F. Kennedy: “Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.”

Known as the “liberal lion of the Senate,” Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., endorsed Obama during the Democratic primary in 2008, helping to legitimize what began as a long-shot campaign against then-frontrunner Hillary Clinton.

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