There’s a polite fiction that says that anybody can get into national politics and succeed, and it’s periodically true (man walks on fucking moon…), but it’s also true that having a famous name or pedigree helps. (Off the top of my head: Clinton, Dodd, Kennedy, Casey, Bush, McCain.. we could keep going.)
And there’s an argument that the help offered by famous family is often innocuous, especially if the person is also talented, because having lots of smart mentors around to help you break into the family business and have you avoid stupid mistakes. No one worries too much about the plumber whose dad was a plumber, or the philosopher whose dad was an academic.
And Caroline Kennedy seems to be a relatively talented fundraiser, and she might even be a good Senator. Yet the prospect that she could be appointed really sticks in my craw. Two reasons. At least the other favored sons and daughters had to be elected, which depending on your amount of cynicism, allows us to judge the instincts of their parents powerful friends and confirm or reject them, or it allows us to believe a little longer in the polite fiction that Mr. Smith could go to Washington.
But the second reason is hinted at in this article: it seems that this is about baby boomers fearing that the government won’t actually work if there isn’t a Kennedy in the Senate. We’d just gotten them past the point of thinking that every Presidential election had to be decided by Vietnam (though with all the cries about Obama and socialism/Communism, they were really trying), and here they are nostalgic over ponies named Macaroni.
(Perhaps a compromise is in order. Caroline Kennedy could get a reality show where cameras followed her around filming her doing good deeds, and the producers could intersperse the segments with pictures of her as a little girl. We could someone with legislative experience for the Senate seat. And then Kennedy could run in 2010 if she wanted.)
Am I the only one this bothers? I just figure if we’re going to have an aristocracy with family Senate seats, we should call it that, and make them wear togas with purple stripes.
16 comments
December 21, 2008 at 10:03 am
saintneko
The only people with the power to change this is the Congress. The founding fathers set up the laws of our nation to discourage aristocracy, but witness how money has corrupted that over time. If politics was iron, money would be oxygen.
December 21, 2008 at 10:30 am
Matt W
No one worries too much about the plumber whose dad was a plumber, or the philosopher whose dad was an academic.
People worry about the second case a little, I think. Surely the big difference is that political positions are really powerful, so it’s more important if they’re passed down dynastically?
Anyway, I understand that Andrew Cuomo is really cheesed off about this.
December 21, 2008 at 10:38 am
dana
People worry about the second case a little, I think
I’ve seen it cut the other direction. X is the son of famous professor Y, so decisions to write a letter for X are considered more carefully.
I think that it might be that it’s harder to measure what makes a good politician than what makes a good plumber, and it’s harder to get rid of them. The plumber whose dad was a plumber who messes up your house isn’t going to get more work; the politician whose dad was a politician has lots of dad’s friends to make connections and fund-raise. That’s most of a politician’s job.
December 21, 2008 at 11:07 am
Matt W
That’s most of a politician’s job.
Or anyway, that’s most of how they keep it. True. But “it’s harder to get rid of them” applies to professors in a big way.
(Also, every second-generation philosopher I’ve known has been perfectly capable, especially the ones reading this post right now.)
December 21, 2008 at 11:52 am
CharleyCarp
I’m not bothered at all by the thought of Ms. Kennedy getting appointed. Someone has to be and by definition it’s going to be someone who wasn’t elected for that role.
If she doesn’t do well at it, she’ll be gone in 2010 — appointed office holders don’t really have that good a track record. Much of the grousing, sfaict, comes from (or on behalf of) people who think it’s their turn — people who would have had many years to wait in Sen. Clinton hadn’t decided to take a cabinet job. Well, if two people think it was their turn, we know that there aren’t “turns” — just ambitions. I don’t see why the ambition of some congressman or woman is to be preferred to the ambition of some private citizen. This private citizen has a better chance than most of holding the seat.
December 21, 2008 at 12:03 pm
dana
Because it is an appointment to the legislature, and the ambitious congressman or woman has some legislative experience.
December 21, 2008 at 2:08 pm
urbino
I can’t seem to gin up much feeling either way. What I’d really like to see happen — because it would be politically smart — is for the Dems to find a reasonably qualified “regular person” who has been thrown out of a job by the current recession (and lost their health insurance) to fill each of the 4 senate appointments now available.
That’s not going to happen.
Since the options actually being considered are all going to be people that other pols in that state owe favors to, I don’t much care which one gets the job. Kennedy hasn’t done anything to merit the job, but she’s at least educated, liberal, and seems to have a sense of noblesse oblige. And she’s already rich enough to be unlikely to corrupt the office. OTOH, I think there’s a strong likelihood that she’s going to find she hates being a senator, and decide not to run in 2010, so maybe it’d be wise to consider somebody else.
December 21, 2008 at 2:21 pm
andrew
it allows us to believe a little longer in the polite fiction that Mr. Smith could go to Washington
Mr. Smith was appointed by the governor (who flips a coin) after the previous holder of his seat died. The governor, known to be the tool of the Taylor machine, couldn’t appoint the machine’s candidate because of the citizens’ committee’s outcry, but he couldn’t appoint the citizens’ committee’s candidate because of Taylor’s opposition. The governor’s kids explain it all here.
December 21, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Dia
Was it Tocqueville who said that Americans had in ingrained yearning for an aristocracy?
December 21, 2008 at 4:19 pm
jacob
We should just be glad that Patterson doesn’t seem inclined to stall for a year and then appoint Chelsea Clinton when she turns 30.
December 21, 2008 at 7:13 pm
jazzbumpa
I’m a first wave baby-boomer, was a junior in H.S when JFK was killed, and I totally agree with Dana. The political dynasties in this country really do resemble European aristocracy. I think we’ve had enough of noblesse oblige and ought to get back to some real democracy. If the founding fathers were serious about not having dynasties (and I think they were, though not uniformly) they really screwed up by not having nepotism specifically prohibited in the Constitution.
But maybe Dia is right. My opinions are usually out of the mainstream . . .
December 21, 2008 at 7:45 pm
Neil the Ethical Werewolf
Dana’s right about the fundraising — the amount of time that candidates have to spend doing that is ridiculous. A buddy of mine has been a fundraising manager in Congressional campaigns, and he sees his job as basically being: force the candidate to spend six hours a day sitting at the phone, calling people on a list and begging for money.
If Caroline Kennedy does nothing to write legislation, and her only role apart from voting is buying the votes of purple-state Democrats leftward with huge money she got from rich New Yorkers, I’ll call it a win.
December 21, 2008 at 8:17 pm
Chris
Some people in any society yearn for an aristocracy. It’s just that most countries in Tocqueville’s day *had* aristocracies, so those people were busy being the aristocracy fan club (sometimes actually becoming servants of the aristocrats). In this country the people who wanted to be followers of aristocrats were a lot more noticeable because they didn’t have any aristocrats to follow.
Nowadays we usually fill this gap reasonably well with celebrities; IMO we don’t really need political aristocrats, but powerful people’s tendency to tilt the playing field in Junior’s favor creates them anyway.
P.S. If the founding fathers were serious about not having dynasties, I guess John Adams must have been one of the exceptions.
December 21, 2008 at 9:08 pm
Michael Turner
Caroline Kennedy is the grandchild of a bootlegger. Irish. Catholic. Serious political liabilities at one time. How aristocratic. In 50 years, people might be complaining about how American democracy just can’t seem to get rid of those Obamas.
“Increasingly equal opportunity to found a political dynasty” — there are worse forms of representation. And nobody seems to keep track of how many wealthy, prominent, influential families have left the political arena over the last 200 years. It’s probably been most of the ones who entered.
It’s inevitable that you’ll get a political class in representative democracies. It could be worse. Here in Japan, I’d say your average Diet member matches the description, “son of a politician, who is himself son of a politician, from the same prefecture.” With minor variations, of course — when PM Obuchi died in office, his body was hardly cold before the LDP stood his daughter up (half Caroline Kennedy’s age, and without CK’s level of legal training, much less her professional experience) for Obuchi’s vacated Diet seat. Voters in his district trust the Obuchi family, so she was a shoo-in. Not too surprising, after you observe Japanese politics for a while.
Ideally? I’m more with jazzbumpa here, I have to admit. I’ve been a fan of James Fishkin for a while.
The notion of selecting members of a legislative body by lottery, as some ancient Greek city states did, is often laughed off the stage because those were slave societies. But most of what slaves did is now done by machine. So I don’t really get this objection.
Then there’s the argument that modern society has become so complex that you need its important decisions made by smart people who work at it full time. Possibly. But you have to wonder how much complexity is created by interest groups using complexity to obscure important issues.
Take credit default swaps. (Please!) Buried deep in a package of legislation eight years ago, there was a clause that kept credit default swaps out of the hands of federal regulatory agencies. I think if you had selected twelve people at random and started explaining to them what a CDS was, they would have called a halt to the testimony and voted to not even allow CDSs, after figuring out that most of their advantages accrue from how they can be used to dodge taxes. They probably wouldn’t even have bothered waiting to hear the economists’ arguments pro and con. We would perhaps have missed out on (arguably real) benefits of a properly regulated CDS market. But we also wouldn’t have nearly the financial toxic waste removal problem we have today.
Just to give one example of how certain kinds of nastiness might be avoided, if lobbyists were forced to explain things to voters as if they were 12 years old.
December 22, 2008 at 12:10 am
Dia
The voters or the lobbyists?
December 22, 2008 at 3:35 am
Jeremy Young
it seems that this is about baby boomers fearing that the government won’t actually work if there isn’t a Kennedy in the Senate.
Only Democratic baby boomers. The Republican baby boomers think government won’t work unless there’s a Bush in government somewhere. They’re already getting ready to elect Jeb Bush to the Senate.