The XX Factor: What women really think.

It's All Relative

Melinda, good point about Caroline Kennedy playing by the rules of the old political guard. Judith Warner, a columnist for nytimes.com, recently wrote an op-ed for the paper implying that Kennedy is not playing by the rules at all. She posits that Kennedy doesn't deserve, and has done nothing to earn, Hillary Clinton's seat in the U.S. Senate. That's Warner's opinion and of course she has a right to it, but I nonetheless found it a bit troubling, especially coming from a woman. This last line of the piece was particularly irksome: "Caroline doesn't have to be a fairy-tale princess anymore. She can be her own white knight, vaulting the Kennedy's proudly into the 21st century, if only she plays by the rules and waits her turn."

Wait her turn? Isn't that what men use to say to ambitious women who seemed too eager to scale the walls of the corporate ladder or break the glass ceiling? When exactly would Kennedy's turn come? And by what means? Imagine if the suffragists and black civil rights activists had sat back and waited for their turn to come knocking on their doors. The notion of waiting for power to be handed to us as some sort of reward for waiting patiently in the wings while others go out and get what they want is so outdated. The people preaching patience are usually the ones holding the power, and are usually unwilling to give it up without a fight. They're also the ones who usually write the rules that Warner says Kennedy should play by.

Just how is Kennedy flouting the rules if they specifically allow for the governor to appoint a replacement for Clinton? The last time I checked, Hillary Clinton had not held political office before she ran for the Senate from a state she had never even lived in until she decided to seek office. So I'm not exactly sure what Clinton did to earn the Senate seat? She ran and she won, and if Kennedy is appointed to Clinton's seat, Kennedy will eventually have to do the same thing to keep it.

I agree with much of the recent commentary and news stories—this one is a particularly fun read—about the sickening level of nepotism in politics, but I don't believe that Caroline Kennedy should be held to a different standard than the many, many other members of Congress who got their seats through familial connections or won their seats with little or no prior political experience.

Yes, Caroline

Have to say, Emily, that your case against Caroline Kennedy for Hillary's Senate seat is a lot more convincing than Richard Bradley's argument that she'd been too tough on him but might not be tough enough to campaign or legislate. (Huh?) And when she heard that Gary Ackerman had compared her to J.Lo., I hope she laughed her tushy off. (Cee K from the Block for Senate? Isn't that a lot like John McCain comparing Obama to Paris Hilton?) Still, I find the whole idea of her second act in Obama's Democratic Party completely irresistible.

She's already come a long way since she stood by her Uncle Teddy at American University last year and endorsed Obama; in retrospect, that seems to have been a turning point both in the campaign and in her life, just a beat ahead of her uncle's cancer diagnosis and her discovery that she not only wanted to pass the baton, but run with it. I find it moving that it took Obama to call her to public service, and think it would be awfully compelling to watch her function as both keeper of the flame and confidante of the change-agent-in-chief. As someone who never wanted to get in the game before, she could be a bridge between the old guard and the new politics.

It is true that suffering and experience are not the same thing—though they were confused often enough during all those arguments about why Hillary ought to get this or that job simply by virtue of all she'd been through. But for me, the question isn't so much whether Kennedy "deserves" the seat. (If politics were about deserves, Nita Lowey would be in her second term as New York's junior senator, and we wouldn't even be having this conversation.) The more important question is whether she'd be any good at it, and I'd have to vote yes on that—then watch with intense interest to see if she proved me right.