Caroline, We Hardly Knew Ye
January 26, 2009
Camelot goes back into the house.
“The announcement took everybody by surprise. Even her closest friends had had no idea on Tuesday that it was coming. What could have happened? Nobody believed it was about Ted Kennedy’s collapse, as the Times initially reported. That didn’t make any sense—he’d been seriously ill for months. And his staff was said to be angry that his illness was being blamed. It was reported, on Thursday afternoon, that she had a household-employee problem and a tax problem, but even this, true or not, didn’t answer all the questions: given that Paterson (according to some, contradicted by others, in a blizzard of claims and counterclaims) had apparently urged her to reconsider her decision, he evidently didn’t regard the problem as disqualifying.
“By Friday morning, the situation had degenerated into open warfare, with some in Paterson’s camp claiming that he hadn’t meant to pick her anyway, and some in Kennedy’s camp claiming that he had meant to pick her, that there was no nanny problem, and that the Governor was destroying an American icon out of pique. ‘This is a governor who lost his chief of staff a couple of months ago to the weirdest tax scandal imaginable, whose first day required him and his wife to discuss the affairs that they had during their marriage and whether or not government money was used for the hotel rooms, and he has people pushing vile comments about Caroline Kennedy?’ Lawrence O’Donnell, a friend of hers and a political analyst for MSNBC, says. ‘And when they get into that phrase ‘not ready for prime time’? This is the ‘not ready for prime time’ governor you’re watching.’” Written by Larissa MacFarquhar.
from The New Yorker
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DB notes: William F. Buckley famously said, “I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University” Agreed, to a point. I was rooting for her.
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