Sen. Edward Kennedy is wheeled to a helicopter at Barnstable Municipal Airport yesterday. He was flown to Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston, after suffering a seizure.

AP / Steve Heaslip

BOSTON — Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the Democratic Party’s liberal lion, suffered a seizure at his home on Cape Cod yesterday morning and was airlifted to Massachusetts General Hospital, where he was awaiting medical tests and resting comfortably last night.

Kennedy, 76, was rushed by ambulance to Cape Cod Hospital from his family’s compound in Hyannisport and flown to Boston after two hours in the emergency room at the hospital on the Cape.

The senator’s spokeswoman, Melissa Wagoner, said, “He is undergoing a battery of tests at Massachusetts General Hospital to determine the cause of the seizure.”

Dr. Larry Ronan, the senator’s primary care physician, later said Kennedy did not suffer a stroke and “is not in any immediate danger.”

“He’s resting comfortably and watching the Red Sox game with his family,” Ronan said in a statement. “Over the next couple of days, Senator Kennedy will undergo further evaluation to determine the cause of the seizure, and a course of treatment will be determined at that time.”

Kennedy’s son, U.S. Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy, D-R.I., flew from Washington, D.C., to Boston yesterday afternoon, according to Robin Costello, Kennedy’s spokeswoman. Patrick Kennedy joined his siblings, Edward Kennedy Jr. and Kara Kennedy, who were already at their father’s bedside.

The senator’s wife, Victoria Reggie Kennedy, and his niece, Caroline Kennedy, were also at the hospital.

Patrick Kennedy received many messages from friends and political allies yesterday. “He would like to thank everybody for their thoughts and prayers,” Costello said.

The senator was on the Cape yesterday preparing to host the annual Best Buddies Challenge, a fundraiser for the Best Buddies charity founded by his nephew, Anthony Kennedy Shriver, that helps people with intellectual disabilities.

A clutch of reporters gathered outside Mass General soon after reports surfaced that the senior senator had been airlifted there. The media were isolated to a roped off area on the sidewalk about 100 yards from the hospital’s main entrance, where there was no sign of additional security measures suggesting that a United States senator was being treated inside.

More than a dozen television cameras representing local and national media outlets were trained on the front door in the event that a hospital spokesperson or family member might speak publicly. None did.

At 8 p.m., more than 10 hours after some reporters first gathered on the sidewalk, hospital spokesperson Peggy Slasman distributed the written statement from Ronan.

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., also visited Mass General yesterday afternoon.

Kennedy had surgery in October at the hospital to clear a blockage in a major neck artery. That problem was discovered during a routine medical examination.

The procedure on his left carotid artery — a blood conduit to the brain — was done by Dr. Richard Cambria, the hospital’s chief of vascular surgery.

A stent was inserted in Kennedy’s artery in a procedure that was done to prevent a stroke. Cambia said Kennedy had a “very high-grade blockage.”

Yet, the surgery did little to slow the pace of Kennedy, known as an energetic senator and vigorous campaigner who, for his age and seniority, keeps an aggressive schedule. Kennedy has long battled a tendency to gain weight, but those who had have seen him frequently since the surgery describe him as having dropped some pounds.

“I saw him last week and it looked like it was an election year for him,” said Sean Richardson, a Washington consultant and a former top aide to Patrick Kennedy. “He looked terrific.”

Since January, Kennedy has crisscrossed the nation stumping for Illinois Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. In January, Kennedy steered his endorsement to Obama at a critical juncture in his candidacy. At that time, Obama was locked in a tight race with frontrunner Hillary Rodham Clinton and needed credibility with party liberals, a strong Kennedy constituency.

In a speech at American University that echoed with the rhetoric of his brothers, civil-rights icon the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln, the senator declared that “it is time again for a new generation of leadership…it is time now for Barack Obama.”

As is always the case when Kennedy makes an endorsement, he jumped into the race with both feet, stumping from Massachusetts to California for Obama.

Yesterday, presidential candidates Sen. John McCain, the near-certain Republican candidate; Obama and Clinton all paused to wish Kennedy a speedy recovery.

“We are going to be rooting for him. And I insist on being optimistic about how it is going to turn out,” Obama said while campaigning in Oregon yesterday.

Clinton said, “My thoughts and prayers are with Ted Kennedy and his family today.”

And McCain called Kennedy a legendary lawmaker and said, “I have the highest respect for him.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., was speaking yesterday to a group of Nevada Democrats in Reno. He told the Associated Press that he spoke to Kennedy’s wife and was told “his condition is not life-threatening, but serious.”

“But the one thing I can say, if there ever was a fighter, anyone who stood for what we as Americans, we as Democrats, stand for, it’s Ted Kennedy,” Reid said.

Kennedy is the last surviving son of New England’s most storied Democratic political family. He is the only son of Joseph P. Kennedy, the financier, movie mogul and ambassador, to live long enough to have his hair turn gray.

His eldest brother, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., was killed in a World War II airplane crash while serving in the U.S. military. President John F. Kennedy was in office when he was assassinated in November 1963, and his other brother, U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated in June 1968 as he campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Rhode Islanders, especially the state’s Democrats, have grown to know Kennedy, who has been an especially familiar figure in the state since his son’s first campaign for state representative in 1988 from a Providence district anchored by the Mount Pleasant neighborhood.

Kennedy and other family members, including the late John F. Kennedy Jr., came to Providence to work on Patrick Kennedy’s successful campaign and returned en masse in 1994, when he won election to Congress.

In 1988, Patrick Kennedy, then a Providence College student, was attacked for being an outsider in his race against John “Jack” Skeffington, the incumbent, a lifelong resident of the neighborhood.

The senator, summoning his famous baritone and humor, told a big campaign crowd that turned out for his son that, “I have a little secret. When the boat came over here from Ireland, it actually landed here in Providence.”

Kennedy was last on the campaign circuit in the state in February, when he was boosting Obama in the Blackstone Valley.

Kennedy, who was elected to the Senate in 1962, has been reelected every six years since and is now second in seniority to Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va.

With Journal wire reports

smackay@projo.com