With his small steps, Kennedy keeps in stride as a player

WASHINGTON -- Last Friday, after coming close but ultimately failing to pull off a sweeping immigration reform bill, Ted Kennedy was sharper and more determined than he's seemed in years. Looking thin and vigorous, the 74-year-old senator declared, ''I'm disappointed but not discouraged. I've been around long enough not to let me get too optimistic too soon on this sort of thing."

The immigration law is the most significant legislative fight in a long time. The fate of millions of people -- an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants currently in the United States, plus countless millions of future immigrants -- is at stake. And Kennedy stands in the middle of it, the one indispensable figure, crowding out not only his own Democratic Party's leaders but also the suddenly hapless and put-upon Republican majority leader, Bill Frist.

It was Kennedy who negotiated with the White House and Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, to craft a compromise that still commands a majority of the Senate; and it will be Kennedy who draws on his personal convictions and decades of good will to try to pull the remaining recalcitrant Democrats aboard over the two-week Senate recess.

Then, if the Senate finally approves a bill allowing some kind of guest-worker program and a path to citizenship for the millions of illegals, Kennedy will strive to keep the White House and the Senate leadership from giving away too much to hard-liners in the House, who want to impose criminal penalties on people who provide services to illegals.

Kennedy is uniquely qualified to maneuver these kinds of legislative straits. Having overseen the most sweeping expansions in history of federal assistance for healthcare and education, Kennedy can make a reasonable claim to being the greatest legislator of his generation.

With his girth, thatch of gray hair, and foghorn voice, Kennedy is built for pomposity, and he could have aged into a fondly indulged anachronism, the last link to Camelot.

But Kennedy isn't pompous. Senators who still harbor hopes for the presidency, like Democrats John F. Kerry of Massachusetts and Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, can be far more windy, trying to speak for the national consensus on every issue.

And older colleagues like Alaska Republican Ted Stevens and West Virginia Democrat Robert C. Byrd are far more fusty, intoning about points of order and senatorial history.

Kennedy's legislative vigor has kept him vital. His positions are relentlessly liberal, and presented without any equivocation or self-consciousness.

But he has a sense of the mainstream, as well. His '60s-style, big-government approach is so out of vogue in national politics that Republican colleagues feel safe befriending him, without fear that any of his views will rub off. But, curiously, they do. And he has built franchises in areas sometimes bypassed by Republicans, such as healthcare and, until the Bush administration, education.

During the long period of Republican control, Kennedy has satisfied himself with incremental steps, inching forward toward long-cherished goals like universal healthcare. But to get a deal, senators usually have to give something back, and Kennedy's wheeling and dealing has sometimes served Republican interests.

Many Democrats feel Kennedy was rolled by Bush on the No Child Left Behind legislation, leaving the senator to moan about promises left unkept by the president. By putting a bipartisan gloss on an ultimately unpopular education bill, Kennedy deprived the Democrats of an issue in the 2004 election and alienated public-school teachers, a core Democratic Party constituency.

The latest immigration compromise wasn't really a Kennedy-Bush collaboration. McCain, Pennsylvania Republican Arlen Specter, Florida Republican Mel Martinez, and other senators had their fingerprints on the deal. But most senatorial observers credit Kennedy with maneuvering the politics of the Judiciary Committee to get the powerful and prideful Specter on board for a bill very much like what Kennedy and McCain had been proposing. And, by crafting a bill closer to what the Democrats wanted than the Republicans, Kennedy put the GOP hardliners on the defensive.

Now, with the bill back in the Judiciary Committee for further tinkering, Kennedy will again be in the eye of the storm. But he expects to produce a bill to his liking, with enough trimming around the edges to allow conservatives to claim a victory. Then, as Kennedy knows only too well from his 43 years in the Senate, a bill will pass that most senators can defend to their constituents. And, most importantly, they won't have to explain how they were steered into it by the Senate's master manipulator.

Peter S. Canellos is the Globe's Washington bureau chief. National Perspectives is his weekly analysis of events in the capital and beyond.