The Enlightened Despot

Count me 100% on Frederick’s boat on the Caroline Kennedy issue: she has no business being appointed Senator of New York, though there would be a certain logic to picking someone unqualified to fill the seat of a woman who presumably decided where to run for the Senate by picking State names out of a hat. This view (that she is unqualified, not the bit about Clinton) is so widespread, that it’s hard to see how Paterson could get away with it. There are, however, a few dissenters outside the Keneddy family. Here, for instance, is John Judis, from his blog post that advertises its incorrectness in its title, ‘It Wouldn’t be a Disgrace‘:

I think it would have made most sense for Barack Obama to have appointed Caroline Kennedy a delegate to the United Nations in the manner of Shirley Temple Black or William F. Buckley. But I am not going berserk as my colleagues seem to be over the prospect that she will be appointed senator. The reason has to do, I suspect, with my understanding of political dynasties. There is a difference between the Kennedy dynasty and, say, the Biden, Clinton, or Bush dynasties. And the difference is that many Americans feel they owe the Kennedy family something for their service.

I almost feel the need to add ‘[sic]‘ to that excerpt, because it seems so improbable that anyone, having inadvertently typed that last sentence, would ever admit to it, let alone allow it to be published. I’m not sure it’s possible to reason with a person who thinks awarding Senate seats as a measure of gratitude to people for being born into neat families, so I’ll move along to the closest thing to a rational defense of a Kennedy appointment I could find, from Hendrik Hertzberg:

One of the plus sides of getting a senator by appointment is that he or she doesn’t have to “earn” it—i.e., doesn’t have to spend years begging for money over the phone, doesn’t have to establish “roots” in some Podunk locality at the cost of forgoing any understanding of the rest of the world, doesn’t have to make nice with local realtors and the like—in short, doesn’t have to have organized his or her entire life around the American way of office-seeking. This makes it possible, of course, for an appointed senator to be an absolutely clueless nonentity. But it also makes it possible, at least in theory, for an appointed senator to be interesting in a way that adds some spark or variety to the institution.

I think Caroline would be in the second category. She is intelligent, sophisticated, educated, and public-spirited. Yes, she is somewhat shy. But don’t shy persons deserve representation, too?

Maybe Kennedy has all of those wonderful qualities. It might even be the case that, if appointed, she would be a terrific Senator, though that strikes me as somewhat unlikely. This is why, as much as I object to her appointment, I can’t take seriously the comparisons to Sarah Palin from sulking Republicans, and even Palin foes like Andrew Sullivan. It’s true that no one was impressed with a brief stint running Alaska and a few years running Wasilla as evidence of her executive competence - nor should they have been. But plenty of people with no executive experience at all end up on presidential tickets, e.g. Barack Obama, John McCain, and Joe Biden. Not having any experience as an executive or conducting foreign policy just gets people wondering if you are up to those responsibilities. Palin’s problem was that all the evidence suggested that she wasn’t.

In Caroline Kennedy’s case, we don’t have much evidence to go on at all, beyond the fact that a lot of bright, reasonable people seem to think that she too is bright and reasonable, which is more than nothing, but only by a very small margin. And this is exactly the problem. Imagine Governor Paterson (who, incidentally, owes New York an account of why there is only one ‘t’ in his name) appointed a cousin of his, of whom no one had ever heard. People would be outraged. Were he to defend his decision saying ‘trust me, he’ll do great’, no one would be impressed. And even if his cousin really did turn out to be a terrific Senator, people would still be outraged.

Hertzberg’s post suggests he would be behind such a move by the governor; if that’s right, fair enough. But I think it’s pretty obvious that most people wouldn’t be. I have nothing against the replacement-by-appointment system, but there does seem to be an implicit understanding that a governor should appoint someone who could conceivably make their case to the electorate, not just some guy he knows who could do a good job. That Caroline Kennedy is even under consideration is, in fact, very good evidence that this standard exists. If Paterson were free (politically speaking) to pick absolutely anyone whose integrity and competence were privately known to him, what are the chances that the best option would happen to be JFK’s daughter?

Whatever wonderful qualities she might have, Caroline Kennedy simply hasn’t done anything that would make her a viable appointment if her last name weren’t ‘Kennedy’. To allow that name to make the difference would, in fact, be a disgrace.

Tags: hillary clinton, Kennedy clan, nepotism

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 24th, 2008 at 6:06 am and is filed under posts by Akhbar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.