'Tenacious' Kennedy refuses to be no-show

DENVER -- For a moment, it was as if 1963 and 1968 and 1980 never happened. The floor of the Democratic Convention became a sea of white-and-blue signs with the name of the man who never became president, who was supposedly too sick to even be there: KENNEDY.

Sen. Edward Kennedy overcame worries about his health to deliver one of his classic stemwinding speeches Monday night, 24 hours after secretly flying in from Massachusetts.

"The hope rises again and the dream lives on," he told the waving, cheering, tearing crowd, reviving memories of the speech he delivered in 1980 when he ended his only run for the presidency by conceding to Jimmy Carter.

He got many ovations, none louder than when he declared, "I pledge to you that I will be there next January on the floor of the United States Senate." The crowd chanted, "Ted-dy! Ted-dy!" for 30 seconds.

"He's our guy!" said John Walsh, chairman of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, who predicted that Kennedy's appeal for unity would end any lingering bitterness between followers of Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

"When Ted Kennedy comes here to ask us all to pull together as a party, not many people in this hall are not going to take that next step," he said.

Alice Wolfe, a five-time Massachusetts delegate who'd stood crying upfront at Madison Square Garden when Kennedy conceded in 1980, said "it never stopped him. He didn't go in a corner and weep. He just started something else. And now here he is tonight — so tenacious!"

By appearing, Kennedy extended a string of consecutive Democratic convention appearances dating to 1972. After a video tribute, Kennedy walked onstage, a bit stiff, escorted by his wife, Vicki.

There was a stool positioned behind the podium. "When I saw that stool, I knew he's speaking," said Walsh, who used to work for Kennedy as an advance man. "Anyone who's advanced for him knows he likes a stool." But Kennedy didn't need it.

"It is so wonderful to be here," he told the delegates. "Nothing, nothing is going to keep me away from this special gathering."