I wasn't quite believing this talk from New York that Caroline Kennedy might be appointed to Hillary Clinton's Senate seat, but I guess it's pretty real. Does it make sense?
Well, maybe. Gov. David Paterson, a Democrat, is being pulled six ways to Sunday by different groups pushing one of their own. You have to choose an upstater. You have to choose someone from the city. It has to be a woman, to replace a woman. No, it should be an African America, whether male or female makes no difference. No, it should be a Latino -- make history!
Choosing Kennedy -- a person from outside the state's political establishment proper -- would enable Paterson to sidestep all these group claims and piss off everyone equally. And of course she's not just anybody, she's a Kennedy, whose uncle held the seat in question.
On the other hand, if I were governor, I might think, why anger all these groups when I could keep at least one or two of them happy by naming the right person? Going outside your party's establishment gives all your opponents something about you to agree on that none of them likes, whereas if you choose a Latino or an upstater or what have you, at least people from that group will speak up at the bar to defend you.
At any rate, I see that Jane Hamsher at firedoglake has declared herself against CK:
Now that the Democrats are in power, she'd like to come in at the top. We have absolutely no idea if she's qualified, or whether she can take the heat of being a Kennedy in public life. She's certainly shown no appetite for it in the past. She'll have a target on her back and if she can't take it, if she crumbles, she will become a rallying point that the right will easily organize around.
The woman has never run for office in her life. We have no idea how she'd fare on the campaign trail, or how well she could stand up to the electoral process. She simply picks up the phone and lets it be known that she just might be up for having one of the highest offices in the land handed to her because -- well, because why? Because her uncle once held the seat? Because she's a Kennedy? Because she took part as a child in the public's romantic dreams of Camelot? I'm not quite sure.
Fair points, I guess. But the real question to ask is, is she ready for the actual difficult work of being a senator? Contrary to what faux-populist radio hosts say, senators work their asses off. Eighteen hour days are common. There's lots to learn. Senators from New York schlep back and forth on that shuttle loaded down with briefing papers and what not -- it must get exhausting. And then, on the subject of travel: New York is a huge state, which means that on weekends a senator is flying hundreds of miles on tiny little planes to Godforsaken places up north where winter sets in in late September and stays til May. Then there's all the money one has to raise, more or less constantly.
Being a senator is glamorous, but it's also loads of hard, hard work. And once you get in there, you learn pretty quickly that you have to stay 18 years (three terms) to really have an impact. Kennedy is 51; is she really ready to commit more or less the rest of her active life, so to speak, to electoral politics?
These are all tough questions for a neophyte to think about, and they're all questions that lifetime pols have long since answered internally. They'd sooner die than stop getting on rickety little planes to go to Watertown for a Kiwanis meeting. They're completely addicted to that life, and it's a really weird, impossible life, which is why most people from other fields of endeavor (i.e. business) don't usually take well to politics.
