I’m not being facetious here when I ask about Caroline Kennedy. Since she’s likely to be the next Senator from New York, I’d like to know a little more about what kind of Senator she might be. Until last year, this is the only thing I knew about her :
That and I think I might have caught her on a talk show once talking about one of her books. That’s it. I understand that she’s had a semi-public life, but I tend to follow electoral politics, not the lives of celebrities from political families.
I’m sure Kennedy is a good person and might make a good Senator, but her thin political resume makes her a blank slate. Where’s her political platform? Has she ever participated in a debate? Does she have a voting record of some sort? Being a prominent Democrat who supported Barack Obama is hardly a defining trait when we’re talking about appointing someone to the United States Senate.
Even worse, when I go to Wikipedia and try to find out what she actually stands for, this is what I get :
Seriously, this isn’t a joke. If Caroline Kennedy were a normal candidate for elected office, she’d have a website in which she presented herself to the people she’s trying to represent, but the closest I could find to that in five minutes of Googling was a Wikipedia bio and her entry at the IMDB.
Unlike every other name on the AP’s short list for the Senate seat, Caroline Kennedy has never been elected to anything, ever1. The people of New York are supposed to accept her jump from “professional Kennedy” into the U.S. Senate based on the assurances of a few powerful elites?? At the very least, the Senate seat should be filled by someone who has actually been chosen by the people of New York for something. Congressmen, State Senators, Mayors, and other elected officials from New York should be outraged by the fact that Kennedy is able to cash in on her family’s name and skip ahead of dozens of dedicated public servants to ascend to one of the most powerful positions in the nation.
Must be nice.
1 : Before anyone mentions it, the selection of Joe Biden’s senior advisor to fill the open Senate seat in Delaware is equally unjust. In some ways, it’s even more bizarre in that Ted Kaufman is clearly just a seat warmer so that Biden’s son can run for the seat in a 2010 special election (Joe was re-elected to his Senate seat last month too), but at least in this case, the potential nepotism will ultimately be decided by voters.