Kennedys Move While Blago Stalls. 
The wailing over the empty Obama Senate seat continues to eat the scenery of Chicago opera,
and the noise provides the Ministry of Kennedy the space and time to grab off, to acquire, to harvest the much more fertile empty Clinton Senate seat in New York. In comparison to Blago and Rahm and Jesse Jackson Jr., the melodrama of David Paterson choosing Caroline Kennedy as a favor to himself to run with her on his ticket in 2010 looks like off-Broadway family faire. The Kennedys remain the champs for fifty years of when to love and when to whisper and when to grab the prize even before they are asked. The news that the auspiciously and expensively entitled Caroline Kennedy aims for the seat arrived in dry, toney form in a midday online report in the Kennedy choice newspaper the NYT, with a political intelligence item in the Boston Globe just moments later. Discreet. Accurate. Overwhelming all media. TDB has a new piece by Elizabeth Wurtzel as to the less than universal applause for Senator Caroline Entitled, to add to the piece I posted last week, originally as "Please, Not Caroline." Too late to be polite now. The detail that most impressed me is that she has already hired Knickerbocker SKD, a political op team connected by op Josh Isay to the senior senator of New York and the only man who has the weight to say no, Chuck Schumer. The only pol the NYT has found to opine that Caroline to the Senate is a weak idea is the veteran and cranky congressman Gary Ackerman of Queens, chair of House Foreign Relations and a non Schumer kind of Dem. Otherwise, with Mike Bloomberg giving thumbs up, with David Paterson most ready, with President-Elect Obama certain he wants his good friend in the Senate to lead his healthcare and education and environmental battles, this is all a done deal. Mrs. Clinton? Onto the world stage again as prime minister; and the still Senator Clinton was in Chicago today with the national security team of the imminent Obama administration. Bully.
Blago Makes the Chicago Way Come Alive.
Caroline's news will not slow the express train that is running in madness in Chicago and now Springfield, as the Illinois House votes 113-0 to start impeachment maneuvers to rid itself of
Blago. At the same time, the Obama transition team voted 1-0 to withhold the results of its internal review of contacts with Blago re the Senate seat at the request of the U.S. Attorney's office. The one vote was the president-elect. Everyone else voted in the Obama style, "present." Even Rahm Emanuel was present at the day's festivites announcing more Cabinet posts; however Rahm is still silent to the media questions. We are told by the Obama team that there were no "inappropriate" contacts between the Obama team and Blago. Plenty of appropriate contacts. Therein lies the tale, and it may arrive next week as a Christmas present as the president-elect travels to Oahu and Rahm Emanuel goes back into hiding. None of the Obama team maneuvers so far do anything to quiet the scandal. And Blago has been busy, busy working on his cheerful resemblance to Al Capone (right). The choicest tip I heard last night Sunday 14 was from Natasha Korecki of the Chicago Sun-Times, who reports that defense attorneys all over Chicago are getting calls from "victims" of Blago pay-for-play schemes over
the years. The victims are worried they are on the tapes and want to move before the FBI shows up at the door. For years. Back to '04 and '03, I asked. Sure, she said. Connect dots. If Obama's seat is worth millions to Blago today, what was it worth in 2003-2004 when it was emptying with the retirement of Republican Peter Fitzgerald? And how did Blago parley that empty seat back then into a victory for his special fixer guy Tony Rezko's protege and student of the Chicago Way, Barack Obama?
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We pick our politicians like the baubles in a jewelry case or the rags we wear by the brands they exhibit. We betray our crushing insecurity by seeking our niche of self-expression under the names of highly advertised celebrities.
Enter the puritan posse who would relieve us of the burden to choose under the premise that variety creates waste; losers; global warming, needless complexity and, hence, more malaise. In their world, in which rugged individualism represents the zenith of sin, they propose to streamline our options to just one car company; one brand of cereal; etc. ...and just one slate of candidates to vote for on election day.
John,
First time posting on your blog. Always loved your show--wish you could b on more regularly. Gevalt, another Kennedy, like we really need one. One good thing about Caroline: even though she belong to "that family of political piranhas", she personally has no dirt about her as well as no personally earned political credentials. She's another persona with a mystique. The Kennedys, like the Clintons (although they consist of only a pair) function as a unit in regard to rallying around one of their own. The way New York politics already is, and the shape on the NY Republican Party, Caroline can't make it any worse than it already is, although not every Democrat politico is going gaga a possible Kennedy being chosen to fill Hillary's senate seat.
Bush Clinton Kennedy Cuomo Dodd
Same families seem to run everything, it is even worse on Wall Street.
Perhaps a wealth tax would be more egalitarian.
From the loins of a bootlegger we have a political dynasty. When are we going to tire of the winners of the lucky sperm contest? William Buckley said “I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.” I would add the Clintons, Bush's and Kennedy's along with the faculty of Harvard.