First published 1/22, 1:30 AM
Updated 1/23 3:30 PM
About 7 PM last night the New York Times tweeted: Caroline Kennedy had asked Governor David Paterson to withdraw her name from consideration for Hillary Clinton's Senate seat.
No further information was immediately offered and that is the beauty of twitter.com; news can be "moved across the wire" to normal people in the same way the AP moves news to the Press Herald and the New York Times.
Quoting unnamed sources, a subsequent NYT story said Kennedy was concerned with the health of her uncle, Senator Edward Kennedy, but various websites had suggested as early as Sunday that she was considering withdrawing because of poor public support.
Subsequently, denials of the story were made by people "close" to Kennedy and Paterson.
Finally, after midnight, the Times ran with Kennedy's offical announcement that she had, indeed, asked Governor Paterson to withdraw her name for "personal reasons."
Last week a Marist poll came out indicating that 40% of New York voters favored Mario Andrew Cuomo while 25% favored Kennedy. Kennedy's number's, in fact, had not changed from a Marist Poll a month ago when she was tied with Cuomo, while he increased from 25% to 40%.
A January 5 poll by Public Policy Polling revealed an even greater spread: 58% preferred Cuomo to 27% for Kennedy.
After the initial "WoW" factor of Kennedy's entering the nomination race, New Yorkers stepped back and asked themselves who *is* this women and what does she have to offer us. And then probably, does she think she has a right to this seat?
Their thoughts probably ran along the lines that "if an unknown fifty-one year old with Kennedy's resume had asked for the appointment, she would not have even made the news."
After her request for the appointment, Kennedy did follow in Hillary Clinton's foot steps and made forays into upstate New York which were well received. However, when Kennedy finally appeared before seasoned national journalists, Kennedy's grasp of important issues she would face was questioned and her repeated hesitations and halts were enumerated and parodied.
The question of entitlement
Although the founding fathers made every attempt to make certain that American could never devolve into a monarchy, we, the people, appear to have developed an entrenched fascination with aristocracy of every stripe.
Of course we can have had our fascination with the movie stars of the 30s to 60s, in politics with the Adams, the Roosevelts, the Bushes, Clintons, the Doles and of course the Kennedys.
But there would be no fascination without a sense of entitlement.
1) A Kennedy family member has been in the Senate for all but two of the last fifty six years. With Senator Edward Kennedy's time in the Senate perhaps coming to an end, maybe the family thought was that Caroline's appointment might bridge any gap.
The two year gap came between JFK's ascension to the Presidency and EMK's election. JFK's college roomate, Ben Smith II, was appointed to fill JFK's open seat; he stepped down two years later when EMK turned 30, the minimum age to become a US senator.
Perhaps the same sense of entitlement is happening with the appointment of Biden's chief of staff Edward Kaufman to Biden's vacated seat until a special election in 2010. At that time, Biden's son Beau should be back from Iraq and could run at the age of 31.
2) When running for election to the Senate, candidates are required to release a "10-part, publicly available report disclosing her financial assets, credit card debts, mortgages, book deals and the sources of any payments greater than $5,000 in the last three years." When asked by the NYT if she would release these records while under public consideration for nomination, Kennedy demurred, informing the NYT that the records would be released only *after* she was actually appointed.
3) Mayor Michael Bloomberg: "Caroline Kennedy is a very experienced woman. She has worked very hard for the city. I can just tell you that she has made an enormous difference in New York City. ****And clearly, being part of the Kennedy family, she has had lots of exposure. Her uncle has been one of the best senators that we have had in an awful long time.****"
4) From the early Thursday AM NYT article: "Ms. Kennedy believed that the job was hers if she would accept it, the person said, but aides to Mr. Paterson would not comment on whether that was true."
Update, Friday
1) Time reports that Ted Kennedy and his "camp" were quite upset that his niece's people floated the excuse for her withdrawal as being her concern with his health. EMK felt this sent a message he was on death's door.
2) CNN reported on Thursday that a source close to Paterson "had no intention of appointing Caroline Kennedy" and that "[t]he source told CNN that Paterson did not think Kennedy was 'ready for prime time,'" seemingly for the reasons I outlined above.
3) The New York Daily News suggested Kennedy's personal problem involved tax issues on a nanny, the same "oversight," if true, that derailed Zoe Baird's nomination to be US Attorney General in 1993.
4) In contrast, the New York Post stated that the personal problem might be a marriage issue. Vanity Fair dissected a rumor pushed on Gawker.com that Kennedy has a "close friendship" with New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger.
5) CBS news reported that her reason for dropping out was ***not her uncle's health*** and noted cryptically that " the reason Kennedy dropped out of contention truly is personal, and is something that only she and her immediate family are aware of."
6) Finally, in a postmortem entitled "Senate bid by Caroline Kennedy started poorly, wobbled badly and finished in a chaotic mess," the Daily News noted a souce close to the Kennedy family said at the begging of her bid "… it's more of a family push than her own" and "When Kennedy finally had her formal sitdown with Paterson on Jan. 10 to discuss the job, her poll numbers were in free fall - and the writing was on the wall..."
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