Ted Kennedy In Hospital With Stroke Like Symptoms

Democratic party warhorse Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy has been rushed to the hospital with stoke-like symptoms, CNN reports:

Sen. Edward Kennedy was rushed to Cape Cod Hospital in Massachusetts Saturday morning, a well-informed, prominent Democratic source in that state told CNN.
The source said the 76-year-old senator had “symptoms of a stroke.”

Kennedy was taken to the hospital around 8 or 9 a.m. from the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis, according to the source. The source said the senator would be transferred to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

That hospital said it had no information on Kennedy.

Kennedy has represented Massachusetts in the Senate since 1962. He is one of only six senators in U.S. history to serve more than 40 years. He is known as a liberal champion of social issues such as health care, family leave, and the minimum wage.

He ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1980. He has endorsed Illinois Sen. Barack Obama for the 2008 nomination.

There will be huge interest in this story about Kennedy, who remains highly controversial in some quarters. But it’ll be big ongoing news for these two reasons:

1. He is the last of the three Kennedy brothers who so dominated the early to mid-1960s.

2. The campaign of Senator Barack Obama had won his endorsement earlier this year and Kennedy had reportedly been planning to go out on the hustings and work for Obama’s election. Since he’s also a superdelegate, he was expected to be influential as the primary season was winding down and was expected to be influential at the Denver convention.