When I was a young lad, I sat in the visitors’ gallery above the U.S. Senate and heard and watched — Sen. Edward Kennedy deliver an impassioned speech about health care.

No — I misspeak. He didn’t merely deliver the speech, because that would imply using e-mail, or Twitter, or Facebook, or any of the other ordinary ways we deliver what we call messages.

He spoke with great eloquence, with a fire that seemed to illuminate the whole chamber. He didn’t seem to be a politician relishing the spotlight; he seemed to believe, utterly, each word he spoke with a conviction as tough as titanium.

Of course, I was a young teen then, and the world still appeared to be a quite romantic place. I mean, I read poetry. Voluntarily.

In these ironic times — well, OK, these times aren’t really ironic, they’re much more sardonic times.

Whatever.

In these times, these days following the death of Sen. Ted Kennedy, I look back at that young boy and am appalled by his naïvité. But I also realize that the older me, the more cynical, more sardonic me, didn’t know Ted Kennedy much better than that kid.

From reading the reams of obituaries and remembrances, one thing struck me, something that I was aware of but hadn’t fully grasped: Kennedy was the great compromiser of his day. His ability to reach across the aisle, which seems to be the requisite phrase in these times, to involve members of the opposite party in fashioning policy, is unequaled in this era.

While Kennedy was the favorite liberal whipping boy for right-wing commentators, he was working with conservative Republican senators, especially Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, to pass legislation that helped people. Did all that legislation please liberals such as me? No. But did it make this country a better place?

Yes.

In 1997, for instance, Kennedy and Hatch worked together to create the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or S-Chip, as it was known.

And as conservative (well, he used to be known as a conversative) New York Times columnist David Brooks put it:

“Kennedy never abandoned his ambitious ideals, but his ability to forge compromises and champion gradual, incremental change created the legacy everybody is celebrating today: community health centers, the National Cancer Institute, the Americans With Disabilities Act, the Meals on Wheels program, the renewal of the Voting Rights Act, and the No Child Left Behind Act.”

These days, of course, in the real world of making policy, bipartisanship seems about as laughable as the quaint romanticism that pervades Casablanca. (Yes, I still like Casablanca. Who doesn’t? Outside of one girl I dated. Briefly.) Conservative activist Grover Norquist’s infamous words, Bipartisanship is another name for date rape, seem to be the rule of the day.

As we wallow through the health-reform debate — or screaming match, as it often more resembles — we are going to miss Kennedy’s touch, his ability to forge compromises, as Brooks put it.

And this country needs some sort of health-care reform. The thousands of Americans who showed up at the Los Angeles Forum in the middle of August to get free health checkups bear testament to that (see the Aug. 15 article in the UK’s Independent.)

And we need someone with Kennedy’s attitude to make it happen. As Ted Kennedy Jr. put it in the Aug. 29 memorial service:

“Remember,” the younger Kennedy said his father once told him, “Republicans love this country as much as I do.”

We liberals need to remember that.

Conservatives need to remember it, too.