When I think of the future of the Democratic Party I think of Ted Kennedy's 1980 convention speech where he defined his party in terms of its values, "old values," as he described them, "that will never wear out. Programs may sometimes become obsolete, but the ideal of fairness always endures. Circumstances may change, but the work of compassion must continue."

Famously, Kennedy's speech ended: "For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die." At this year's convention, both Michelle Obama and Kennedy himself echoed those words.

1980 was the year that Kennedy lost the Democratic nomination to Jimmy Carter ---who would, in turn, lose to Ronald Reagan. Kenney's speech that night was one of the last truly great, old-fashioned convention speeches that Democrats would hear--- until this year, when Ted once again appeared.

In the interim, it has sometimes seemed that the Democrats have lost sight of those values Kennedy located at the very core of Democratic beliefs: "compassion, fairness and the future." After the conservatives took power in 1980, too many Democrats began running scared, and, at times, it became difficult to tell one party from the other.

There were exceptions. Barack Obama's speech at the 2004 convention stood out. It would stir the nation. But before returning to that speech--and asking why we responded so strongly--let me draw a parallel between Hillary Rodham Clinton's speech at this year's convention and Kennedy's, in 1980. Together, these three speeches, coming from three very different points in time, paint a sign-post for the Democratic Party.

Like Ted Kennedy in 1980, this week, Clinton was the loser. Nevertheless, like Kennedy, she gave the best speech of her career. And, like Kennedy, she defined the overriding difference between Democrats and Republicans without apology: Democrats share a collective vision of the nation.

First Clinton drew vivid sketches of those she had met on the campaign trail:
"I will always remember the single mom who had adopted two kids with autism. She didn't have any health insurance; and she discovered that she had cancer. But she greeted me with her bald head, painted with my name on it, and asked me to fight for health care for her and her children.

"I will always remember the young man in a Marine Corps t-shirt who waited months for medical care, and he said to me, 'Take care of my buddies. A lot of them are still over there.' And then, 'Will you please take care of me.'

"And I will always remember the young boy who told me his mom worked for the minimum wage, that her employer had cut her hours. He said he just didn't know what his family was going to do."

Then she asked her supporters question that would deliver them to Barack Obama:

"Were you in this campaign just for me? Or were you in it for that young Marine and others like him? Were you in it for that mom struggling with cancer while raising her kids? Were you in it for that young boy and his mom surviving on the minimum wage? Were you in it for all the people in this country who feel invisible?"

Here, Hillary rejected the "personality politics" that our oh-so-shallow political pundits seem to adore--and that Glen Greenwald has described so well in Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics. In place of personalities, Clinton evoked an idea that Democrats share, the idea of making common cause.

It is the same collective vision that Barack Obama appealed to at the Democratic convention four years ago when he told his audience:

"John Kerry believes in America. And he knows that it's not enough for just some of us to prosper -- for alongside our famous individualism, there's another ingredient in the American saga, a belief that we're all connected as one people. If there is a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If there is a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for their prescription drugs, and having to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandparent. If there's an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties."

These are not conservative values. These are not libertarian values. These are radically progressive, Democratic values. And by "radical" I mean that they lie at the root of what Democrats have believed for decades. This is why, in 2004, so many people recognized Barack Obama as a natural Democratic Party leader.

These also are the very things that today's pollsters and Focus Group Gurus tell us that we should never say to middle-class Americans. "Never ask an American family to sacrifice for another American family," I heard a pollster warn not long ago. I can only wonder: what would she think about asking an American family to imagine themselves in the place of an Arab-American family?

But imagination and a belief in an egalitarian society distinguish Democrats. And back in 1980, Ted Kennedy insisted up making that distinction clear.

He was firm: Republicans are not, and never will be Democrats, even when they
pretend:

"The 1980 Republican convention was awash with crocodile
tears for our economic distress," Kennedy declared, "but it
is by their long record and not their recent words that you shall know them.

"The same Republicans who are talking about the crisis of unemployment have nominated a man who once said, and I quote, 'Unemployment insurance is a prepaid vacation plan for freeloaders.' And that nominee is no friend of labor.

"The same Republicans who are talking about the problems of the inner cities have nominated a man who said, and I quote, 'I have included in my morning and evening prayers every day the prayer that the Federal Government not bail out New York.' And that nominee is no friend of this city and our great urban centers across this nation.

"The same Republicans who are talking about security for the elderly have nominated a man who said just four years ago that 'Participation in social security should be made voluntary.' And that nominee is no friend of the senior citizens of this nation."

As he denounced the Republicans, Kennedy took special delight in exposing the poverty of their ideas:

"The same Republicans who are talking about preserving the environment have nominated a man who last year made the preposterous statement, and I quote, 'Eighty percent of our air pollution comes from plants and trees.' And that nominee is no friend of the environment."

[I can still hear Kennedy, enunciating "plants" and "trees," with such derision, in that broad Boston/Harvard accent.]

"And the same Republicans who are invoking Franklin Roosevelt," Kennedy continued, "have nominated a man who said in 1976, and these are his exact words, 'Fascism was really the basis of the New Deal."'And that nominee whose name is Ronald Reagan has no right to quote Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

"The great adventures which our opponents offer is a voyage into the past," Kennedy insisted. "Progress is our heritage, not theirs. What is right for us as Democrats is also the right way for Democrats to win.

"The commitment I seek is not to outworn views, " Kennedy added, "it is surely correct that we cannot solve problems by throwing money at them, but it is also correct that we dare not throw out our national problems onto a scrap heap of inattention and indifference."

Kennedy was not afraid to talk about poverty: "The poor may be out of political fashion, but they are not without human needs. The middle class may be angry, but they have not lost the dream that all Americans can advance together.

"As Democrats we recognize that each generation of Americans has a rendezvous with a different reality," he acknowledged. "The answers of one generation become the questions of the next generation. But there is a guiding star in the American firmament. It is as old as the revolutionary belief that all people are created equal, and as clear as the contemporary condition of Liberty City and the South Bronx."

Kennedy understood that Democrats could find their future only if they understood their past--only if they remembered who they were. This week, Kennedy, Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama all spoke with the confidence of Democrats who know who they are and what they stand for. And that it is not about them as individuals, but about us, collectively.

If the country had listened in 1980, and Reagan had been defeated . . . how different our history, and our present, would be. Reagan laid the foundation for George W. Bush's election. Looking back is important, not out of nostalgia, but so that we don't let history repeat itself.

Today, McCain has drawn a line in the sand. He is the conservative's conservative.

Barack Obama and the Democratic Party need to respond in kind, as Obama himself did in 2004.

This is not a time for post-partisan politics. This is a time for proudly partisan politics.