Sen. Kennedy Profiled in Washington Post

The Washington Post has a great profile of Sen. Kennedy that is well worth a read. The article is titled The Kennedy Factor and looks at Kennedy’s efforts on behalf of the Kerry campaign, and reflects on his long career in the United States Senate.

For a man of so many accomplishments, it can be difficult to identify which will become defining parts of his legacy, and which will at best be footnotes to the story. In 1994, and with essential aid from the AI Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I helped to make Senator Kennedy the first member of Congress with a web site. Later that same year, this time with help from the DSCC, I helped to bring his campaign for re-election to the Senate online, among the first campaigns on the web. Those two web sites were important milestones in the development of the field of online politics.

Today every member of Congress is online, and many have developed very sophisticated web sites that serve as ‘always-open’ online offices to their constituents. And candidates at all levels, running for offices local and national, are using the Internet in amazing ways to engage and communicate with voters, and to generate very tangible resources in the form of email lists, volunteers, and online contributions.

Certainly it was inevitable that as the use of the Internet became routine in the lives of all Americans, that politics would be among the many types of information and activities that they would engage in online. But ten years ago this was not as apparent as hindsight reveals it to be today. In 1994 it took forward thinking candidates and elected officials such as Sen. Kennedy to recognize the opportunity that the Internet presented, and to turn loose their young geeks to help get them there. I am very proud to have been involved with this footnote in his career, and of my ongoing work with his office to continue to develop and advance this new medium for political communications.