By Patricia Lee Sharpe
It’s obvious that the biggest thing Caroline Kennedy has going for her is the name and the spurious mystique, one of the greatest PR coups/hoaxes in American history. The myth of Camelot, I mean. What sustains the myth is the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Assassination is always tragic, in personal terms. Worse, it’s not good for any political system to have too many people thinking they can bump off leaders.
The Kennedys have traded very effectively on the myth of extraordinary promise unfulfilled. In American presidential politics, there’s nothing like a full term, or two, in office to take the bloom off the rose. John Kennedy didn't govern long enough for the usual disillusionment to be confirmed. It’s a shame that Caroline’s father and uncle got killed during an unusually turbulent period of American history, and it’s too bad that her other uncle is gravely ill, but American politics has long since emerged from the period when a dramatically vacated Senate seat, for instance, was automatically replaced by his grieving widow, qualified or not.
It Was Obvious
What was in the works leaped out at me the moment she appeared on the podium, with the now practically sainted Senator Edward Kennedy, to endorse Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton. Caroline Kennedy was going into politics. When, during the Democratic convention, she was tapped to introduce Edward Kennedy’s heart-stopping appearance, given his very recent operation for brain cancer, and she then went on to deliver not an introduction but a serious address, it seemed absolutely incontrovertible to me: Caroline Kennedy’s love of the private life had palled.
Had Barack Obama, about to become the Democratic nominee for president, already assured her that, if elected, he would make appointments in such a way that Senator Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate seat would be up for grabs? Or had Caroline indicated she would be satisfied with a Cabinet appointment? Uncle Bobbie’s old post of Attorney General, perhaps? I have no idea. But once the election was over, it was clear that Obama owed her a big one. She’d helped him snag the youth vote by reviving the Camelot myth to give a golden glint to the emotional appeal of his mantra of hope and change.
Yes, I know that Caroline Kennedy is a lawyer and that she has written books on constitutional law and human rights. (Would they have got published in the first place or sold so well if she weren’t a Kennedy?) Like lots of rich working mothers, she has a record of community service, too. It might be said, then, that she is sufficiently qualified for the position to which she is now very actively aspiring.
Not Quite a Dime a Dozen
But New York is the second most populous state in the U.S. New York City is hardly a provincial capital. All of which is to say that the number of people (the number of women even) who are equally qualified, as lawyers, as writers on pertinent topics, as community leaders, must number in the hundreds, if not thousands. There is only one thing that distinguishes Caroline and that is her last name. Kennedy.
It seems to me, Governor Paterson, that it would give much more hope to alienated young people and it would revive the democratic faith of multitudes of disillusioned people in this country, if the appointment you need to make went to someone equally or more qualified who does not spring from a political dynasty, who made it on his or her own. Frankly, I felt much the same way several years ago when I learned that Hillary Clinton planned to seek a Senate seat from New York. There must be lifelong New Yorkers, I thought, with an equal or better claim to the seat. But at least Hillary went on to win her place in the Senate the hard way, by campaigning, by selling her suitability, vote by vote, to upstate New Yorkers who had greeted her candidacy very skeptically.
The Ludicrous Royalty Bit
What concerns me about Caroline Kennedy as a Senate prospect isn’t simply the garbage about American royalty that many Americans so oddly buy into. It’s a deep fear about developing encouraging the notion that anyone is entitled to office by heritage.
Let’s get the “Kennedy aristocracy” bit out of the way first. The Kennedys emigrated from Ireland, like thousands of others who left that starving colony of Britain. Like many others, they did well in America. But let’s be clear about where the money that educated John F. Kennedy at Harvard and paid for his political campaigns came from. It came from bootlegging during the Depression. Now I happen to think that Prohibition was a mistake, but in order to be a successful smuggler in any era you have to have nasty friends. There’s nothing noble there. But there’s worse, Kennedy père, whose money bought him influence and position, including an Ambassadorship to London, was an out-and-out Nazi sympathizer. This is nothing to be proud of.
Although a Fascist may have a perfectly respectable set of children who have every right to aspire to the highest office in the land, the facts prove that the Kennedy family story is more like Spamalot than Camelot. But my objection to the romance of the Kennedys goes much deeper. I fear the creation of a political class in this country.
The Political Class Disaster
Here’s how it works. If you grow up in a political family, you learn a thing or two about politics and you may inherit your father’s or your uncle’s courtiers, who will be happy to promote you because you have a name brand that may keep them in power, too. Thus, it all works out in a very cozy fashion. Unfortunately, for the ambitious and for those they wish to govern, there is something in genetics that’s called regression to the mean. A family produces a few geniuses—political geniuses, artists, entrepreneurs, whatever. Sometimes the next generation is pretty talented, too, but not nearly so outstandingly. By the third generation, the kids are average, except they’ve got this terrific family name to trade on.
If this sort of thing goes on too long, the system can get pretty pernicious, as in Latin America and other countries which stagnate or, worse, get mired in corrupt stratification. Political families who’ve done well financially (and sometimes too well) link up. They intermarry. They scratch each other’s backs. There’s horse-trading. There’s office-buying. Etc. The result, eventually, is a political system that may lead to bloody revolution or, perhaps, only to a populist revolution headed by a flamboyantly non-aristocratic Hugo Chavez type, in angry compensation.
So far, in the U.S., the obviousness of the regression factor seems to have discouraged the political promotion of too many weak shoots. The Adams family lasted into three increasingly less impressive generations. The Rockefellers got rich the dirty way, aspired to the presidency, snagged three governorships and a lot of influence, and now their importance has waned. And so on.
So maybe I should relax. Maybe Americans are smart enough to respect individual talent and hard work more than name. Maybe they understand there’s more Spamalot than Camelot in any political family, even the Windsors.
It's Up to You, Guv
The question is: does New York’s Governor Paterson understand?
Paterson is obviously concerned to nominate someone who’ll be able to win an election when the time comes, so the temptation to cash in on a famous last name is going to be hard to resist. Yet names can be made, too. That’s one of the joys of the appointed replacement system that puts him in the hot seat right now. Even someone who’s highly qualified though not terribly well known at the time of his/her appointment has time, once in the Senate, to achieve a track record to run on.
Please remember that, Governor, before succumbing to the Kennedy mystique.