Run, Caroline, run!
At a time of gloom and economic doom, we could use a little glamour. Depression-era Americans had Shirley Temple on the movie screen; recessionistas of today deserve a Senator Caroline Kennedy on Capitol Hill.
You've caught, no doubt, some of the breathless drama playing out in New York as various figures jockey to fill the Senate seat that will be vacated by Hillary Clinton when she becomes secretary of state. After a little, who-me bit of coyness, JFK's daughter now is openly coveting and actively campaigning to succeed Clinton, and just like that, she is the immediate front-runner to get it.
Places, everyone, and action!
There is nothing like a Kennedy to get the politico-industrial complex revving into high gear. Cue the theme of Camelot, alert the Kennedy devotees and the Kennedy haters and someone call Doris Kearns Goodwin, for heaven's sake.
But there are Kennedys, and then there is this Kennedy. Nothing against the less-celebrated cousins - isn't there one who makes documentaries, and is that the same one who is married to the Irish guy? - but Caroline is in a class all her own. The daughter of JFK, she is also his last survivor.
You have to feel sorry for New York Gov. David Patterson - if, that is, he actually is considering one of the other candidates - how do you say no to the closest thing America has to a princess? Of course, this being New York, there are any number of other candidates, such as Andrew Cuomo, himself a political scion but also someone messily divorced from another Kennedy.
(Why, by the way, does New York get all the drama, and given that, why does it try to horn in when the spotlight occasionally shines elsewhere - did you see New York magazine somehow has decided that President-elect Barack Obama is really from New York, not Chicago? Of course, given the possible spillover of the scandal over how Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich has dealt with filling Obama's Senate seat, maybe the president-elect will decide he indeed is a New Yorker after all.)
Maybe you have to be, ahem, of a certain age to feel a rightness about the prospect a Senator Caroline Kennedy, that the charming child who frolicked in her dad's Oval Office and rode her pony on the White House lawn should now as a graceful adult return to Washington. It's irrational, no doubt, but something in me would like to see the circle closed.
