Caroline Kennedy: The senator who wasn’t

When word leaked out that Caroline Kennedy was interested in Hillary Clinton's Senate seat, the media and the public instantly saw her as the front-runner. What happened?

As fiascoes go, said Sam Tanenhaus in The New York Times, there was something “fitting—or at least symmetrical”—about this one. Last week, a young and charismatic president moved into the White House with his beautiful young family, and two days later Caroline Kennedy, the only surviving member of another glamorous “First” household, failed spectacularly in her bid to keep the family legacy—and mystique—alive. This tortured tale began in early December, said Chris Smith in New York, when Kennedy, 51, “upended a life of privacy” and placed a “single, out-of-the-blue phone call” to New York Gov. David Paterson, saying she was interested in the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Hillary Clinton. Seven weeks later, amid a swirl of rumors and accusations, Kennedy withdrew her name “for personal reasons,” and Paterson gave the seat to Kirsten Gillibrand, a little-known one-term congresswoman from a rural district upstate. Did the painfully shy Kennedy get cold feet, after trying to transform herself into an extroverted New York politician? Did some hidden scandal come to light? Nothing is clear, except that during Kennedy’s brief, disastrous flirtation with the family business, New York politics “devolved from dysfunctional to chaotic, tarnishing every major player involved.”

It had started so auspiciously, said Corky Siemaszko in the New York Daily News. In addition to her magical last name, “JFK’s daughter had another huge ace in her pocket”—her early support of Barack Obama. When Caroline declared last January that Obama was the first candidate to inspire her “the way people tell me that my father inspired them,” it gave Obama’s campaign a major boost and earned Kennedy considerable political capital. When word leaked out of her interest in the Senate seat, the media and the public instantly saw her as the front-runner. But then Kennedy started giving interviews, said Tucker Carlson in TheDailyBeast.com, in a weary monotone punctuated by endless ums and you knows. She seemed to shrivel in the public spotlight, and after a lifetime of assiduously avoiding attention and controversy, it appeared she’d gotten into the race only because someone in her family had urged her to. Her name aside, “she was the worst candidate ever.”

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