Robert McHenry: The Junior Senator from New York (Caroline Kennedy?)
First, it is important to clear up an unfortunate confusion. It is said, by way of criticizing Ms. Kennedy and those who support her, that she lacks relevant and sufficient experience. And to demonstrate the alleged hypocrisy of some of those supporters, we are reminded that they, or some of them, took precisely that position with respect to the recent candidacy of Gov. Sarah Palin for the vice presidency. The similarities in the two cases are entirely superficial.
Governor Palin stood for an office that would have placed her next in line to the presidency, and that with a president who was a good deal older than most. Was she in fact fit to be president of the United States? Let’s review: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, another Adams …
Oh, you say, the Founders. Unfair.
Yes, the Founders were a constellation of talents and intellects seldom seen in human history. But, fairly or not, to our vast and continuing glory and benefit they set a standard. Then there were Lincoln, Grant (not nearly the failure you may think), Cleveland, T. Roosevelt, the other Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and so on (I omit a few names around which uninformed controversy still whirls). Seen from that perspective, it is embarrassing even to formulate the question about Governor Palin.
The Senate is a different place from the White House, and a senator is quite a different animal from a president. The House of Representatives almost always contains a quota of oddballs of the workaday, village sort, but the Senate has been home over the years to our more prize specimens, who are given six-year terms in which to entertain us. I name but a few:
The gravitas of a Founder is not a requirement, as we see. As to experience, well, everything that happens to one is experience, provided one is conscious. What is important is what one makes of it. Moreover, what counts as experience varies from state to state.
California, where the entertainment industry accounts for a large part of the state budget and an even larger part of the content of any newspaper or news broadcast, once sent song-and-dance-man George Murphy to the Senate. In just the same way, Kentucky still sends former major league pitcher Jim Bunning. Bunning threw a perfect game in 1964, and it’s very hard to see how that could be held to disqualify him for the Senate.
Colorado elected Ben Nighthorse Campbell, whose background as an Olympic judo competitor and a jewelry designer were sufficient, if humdrum, but whose name alone, would obviously have earned him the seat.
And so to Ms. Kennedy. Credentials? She knows just about everybody who has any money or any influence. What, in New York, could better constitute relevant experience?
The State of New York, so famously open that candidates for a Senate seat need not ever have lived there, is also famously the place where, if you can make it, you can make it anywhere. Ms. Kennedy has not only made it, she is it. Surely she can hold her own in a sleepy Southern town like Washington, D.C.