Sloppy Analogies

Just weeks after her name appeared as a possible replacement for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Caroline Kennedy is being smeared by all sorts of pundits and big mouths as the Democratic equivalent of Sarah Palin.

Give me a break!

Caroline might be a novice to politics, and exempted from too many requirements of public service just because of who her father was, but she is no Sarah Palin.

I'm not sure that I want Caroline to become my senator. I'm not sure she has the steel needed to fight for the people of the state. And certainly, after watching the debacle of this waning administration, dynasties should not become a part of American politics. Dynasties happen when no one else has the nerve or the inner corruption to run for public office. No one should be born into public office, not here. We aren't a monarchy for a reason.

However, Caroline Kennedy has an impressive resume. She is a graduate from Radcliffe College, then the women's college of Harvard University. She then attended Columbia Law School and graduated in the top ten percent of her class. Unlike her younger brother, John, now deceased, she passed the bar exam on the first round.

She has raised money for the Fund for New York Schools--$65 million--and in 1989 created the Profiles in Courage Award, which has honored folks both renowned and less known for standing up to authority and changing the course of history. She serves as the president of the Kennedy Library board and as a member of several others.

She can deliver a speech, but has none of the charisma of her father.

According to the New York Times on January 3, 2009, Kennedy didn't have to disclose her finances when she became chief executive of the Office for Strategic Partnerships. She has managed to keep her life more private than most children of assassinated presidents.

All of this creates a mixed picture of who Caroline Kennedy is and what she has to offer the people of the State of New York. But clearly, she is intellectually rigorous, more than aware of the structure and function of American government, and what probably makes her so attractive to key Democratic Party leaders, is her ability to raise money. She has star power. Or seems to if she doesn't open her mouth. According to news accounts of her first interviews after throwing her hat into the ring for the nomination, she says "you know" and "um" too many times to sound as intelligent as her education presupposes. Check out this synopsis of New York press coverage of her first interviews. But unlike Sarah Palin, it's not that Kennedy doesn't know, it's that she is unaccustomed to the unscripted interview format.

Does that mean she is ill-prepared for the rough and tumble of the Senate?

Sarah Palin is ill-informed, and from her record at multiple colleges, intellectual rigor isn't a part of her character. She is ignorant. She is a great speech-giver, but who wrote the speeches? Delivering a punch line and devising policy are very different things. That Palin was a commuications major says a lot about who she is: a telegenic face reading a script written by someone else.

My eighth grade English teacher would never allow such sloppy analogies.

For an interesting discussion about what constitutes "experience" in the work place, although toned decidedly for educated, middle and upper class women, see Lisa Belkin's piece in the Sunday New York Times Magazine.