Caroline

How pathetic are those blowhards from both of our quasi-official parties who have been mouthing off in recent days about how unqualified Caroline Kennedy is! How ironic that some of them were, and still are, Hillary supporters; in other words, believers in the “qualifications” of an Official Wife whose undistinguished Senatorial career, essentially a launching pad for her failed Presidential bid, began when she was parachuted into the state of New York!

[In fact, that Presidential bid failed less than appears, inasmuch as the cause of a Clinton Restoration has been taken up by Hillary’s rival, Barack Obama, and inasmuch as, thanks to Obama, Hillary herself has been appointed to the one post, Secretary of State, that she and her husband deem worthy of her – notwithstanding the fact that, again, her qualifications consist mainly in having been an Official Wife.]

In any case, as Caroline’s critics well know, in the House and Senate, how well one does and how effective one is depends, more than anything else, on one’s staff. In that department, Caroline is superbly “qualified” because her doting uncle has the best staff in town, and it’s a sure thing that he and they will instantly assure that she has all she needs, and more. Caroline is therefore in an excellent position to function as a Senator – far better than her critics. She’s also in an excellent position to run in 2010, especially in New York, where, more than in most other jurisdictions, money talks – and the Kennedy name can raise oodles of it. As for suffering fools – “liberal” and not so liberal pundits, self-important political hacks in the Democratic Party, acolytes of New York’s countless interest groups – she has two years to polish her act. In the meantime, she has only to tap into that Kennedyesque combination of noblesse oblige and the common touch that JFK and RFK exuded, and that her Uncle Teddy still does (to far better effect than either of the other two!).

Why care, since Caroline’s politics, as best as it can be discerned, is just a tad better than Hillary’s or, for that matter, New York’s Senior Senator’s, Charles (Schmucky Chucky) Schumer. I care because I want Hillary’s Senate seat to be the launching pad for the first woman President of the United States – but not for Hillary! How deliciously ironic that would be! Now that Obama has taken away the sting of their defeat, it would be the only way those wretched Clintons – the murderers by sanctions of some half-million Iraqis, the state smashers and ethnic cleansers of the former Yugoslavia, the “humanitarian interventionists” eager to wreak havoc at the slightest provocation, the kinder, gentler Reaganite dismemberers of our fragile welfare state, the free-marketeering Wall Street flunkies, the destroyers for a generation of the hope for health care reform – will be brought to a pale semblance of justice.

Having gotten through three generations of the Bush family (with Brother Jeb waiting in the wings), it should be plain to all that our dynastic “democracy” has its shortcomings, especially when our institutions are essentially up for sale. But dynasticism also opens up possibilities that would be otherwise unavailable. Whatever a Senate seat in New York will be going for in two years time, a Senate seat for Caroline Kennedy would be, as the Mastercard ad puts it, “priceless.”