Campaign Diaries

Caroline Kennedy continues her charm offensive in New York amid contrasting chatter as to her chances. Some sources portray her as the clear favorite, while others insist that her open campaigning has so annoyed Gov. Paterson that her chances have gone down significantly. The latter narrative is gaining steam, however, and this much-discussed New York Times article captures this change in conventional wisdom.

One major source of trouble for Kennedy is that she is being increasingly portrayed as Mike Bloomberg’s creature. As Bloomberg’s entourage is actively supporting Kennedy’s quest, many are annoyed at the New York City’s Mayor’s intrusion in Democratic politics and they worry that Kennedy would be beholden to Bloomberg. Such concerns led Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (one of the state’s most powerful Democrats) to announce his opposition to Kennedy’s appointment on Wednesday:

“And if I were the governor, I would look and question whether this is the appointment I would want to make: whether her first obligation might be to the mayor of the City of New York, rather than to the governor who would be appointing her,

Kennedy further hurt her cause when she refused to answer whether she would back Bloomberg’s Democratic opponent in the 2009 mayoral race. It would certainly hurt the Democrats’ mayoral chances for one of the state’s two Democratic Senators to remain conspicuously absent, and this will undoubtedly motivate Rep. Anthony Weiner (a probable mayoral candidate) to take a firmer stance against a Kennedy appointment.

All of this said, it is difficult to talk about Kennedy’s “Bloomberg connection” since it is unlikely she would be talked this close to a Senate seat without her Bloomberg connection.

Kennedy also seems determined to continue channeling Sarah Palin; as if her lack of a public record and her early reluctance to talk to journalists were not enough, Kennedy is now displaying her status as a mother as one of her chief qualifications to be a Senator.

In the same interviews, Kennedy is explicitly bringing up her last name, openly using the legend of Camelot as a cover for her lack of a public record. “I think I bring a lifetime of experience to this,” she said today on NY1. “In my family public service is really the greatest honor anyone can have, it’s a legacy I cherish, and that I’ve tried to live up to my whole life.”

And Kennedy is seeking to complement the dearth of recorded policy positions by taking positions on some issues here and there (generally those that have a national scope like gay marriage rather than those that have a local resonance).

On many issues, Kennedy’s vague answers are as evasive as those of other candidates. Her newly articulated position on NAFTA, for instance, is not more incoherent than Barack Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s were last spring (the New York Times describes it as such: “She expressed some concern about what she described as ‘unintended, negative consequences…’ but stopped short of saying that it should be modified”).

The difference is that we have nothing other than Kennedy’s current statements with which to judge her interest in policy matters and assess her political ideology and policy positions. This makes her cherry-picking which issues to suddenly articulate a public position on somewhat difficult to stomach.

None of this is to say that Kennedy’s prospects have faded since last week, nor that she isn’t at the top of Paterson’s Senate seat. All we are observing is that Kennedy is now being hurt by the length of this appointment process.

Hillary’s appointment to the State Department was announced weeks ago, but Paterson will not designate her successor before Clinton is approved by the Senate and resigns from her seat. This will not happen before mid-January, meaning that the New York press is forced to draw out the story and find subplots to explore, making it difficult for any front-runner to keep his or her position before the conventional wisdom changes to keep the story interesting.

The best hope for Kennedy’s rivals is that Kennedy draws more criticism as she remains in the spotlight (Silver’s anti-Caroline diatribe was already a major coup for Kennedy’s opponents), allowing for another Democrat (perhaps Andrew Cuomo, or Thomas Suozzi, Jerry Nadler, Kirsten Gillibrand) to lobby his or her way into Paterson’s favor without drawing the ire of the rest of the Democratic establishment.

Update: And the daily drip continues with this Times article: “In an extensive sit-down discussion Saturday morning with The New York Times, she still seemed less like a candidate than an idea of one: eloquent but vague, largely undefined and seemingly determined to remain that way.”