False Prophet.(ISSUES & INSIGHTS)(EDITORIALS)(Editorial)

Politics: In a TV interview, Ted Kennedy called it a "disaster because it's a result of blunder after blunder after blunder." He was speaking of Iraq, but he might as well have been describing his own career in the U.S. Senate.

Like Marlon Brando's character in "On the Waterfront," Kennedy could have been a contender. In late 1979, when he decided to challenge President Carter for the 1980 Democratic nomination, he sat down with CBS' Roger Mudd.

In that fateful interview, Mudd asked Kennedy a simple question: Why did he want to be president? Kennedy's garbled, meandering reply effectively ended his presidential aspirations for good.

But character flaws and lack of judgment may have doomed him long before. During his days at Harvard, he was expelled after a friend took a Spanish exam for him. In 1969, the senator steered his car off a bridge, then fled the scene, leaving his female companion to drown in water only six feet deep at Chappaquiddick. A profile in courage he is not.

Despite all that, Kennedy still could have had a respectable Senate career. Yet as a ranking member of the Judicial and Armed Services committees, he's been bitter, irresponsible and at times irrational.

In hearings on Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court, Kennedy said that while Bork had abandoned some of his more "Neanderthal" views, his appointment would result in an America where "women would be forced into back alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters" and "rogue police would break down citizens' doors." He'd repeat the "Neanderthal" charge in opposing George W. Bush's judicial nominees Janice Rogers Brown, Priscilla Owen and Carolyn Kuhl.

Kennedy has gotten older, but obviously not wiser or more coherent. Even the French and Germans saluted the courage of the Iraqi people who chose liberty under threat of death, yet Kennedy refused to join the chorus admitting the Iraqi elections were a stunning success. That would mean the president was right and he was wrong.