The Best Government (Kennedy) Money Can Buy

Caroline Kennedy can bring in the big bucks. That makes her Senate material in the eyes of the Democratic Party.

Caroline Kennedy isn’t waiting to call in favors for her early endorsement of Barack Obama during the presidential campaign. She wants immediate membership in the most exclusive millionaires club in America, the U.S. Senate. And she doesn’t want to be bothered with the nuisance of that little thing called an election either. From today’s NY Times:

Caroline Kennedy … will seek the United States Senate seat in New York being vacated by Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Ms. Kennedy ended weeks of silence with a series of rapid-fire phone calls to the state’s leading political figures, including Gov. David A. Paterson, in which she emphatically and enthusiastically declared herself interested in the seat

It’s good to hear that Kennedy is ‘emphatic’ and ‘enthusiastic’ about the chance to become one of the 100 most powerful human beings on the planet. And here at Captive American, it’s no secret that we strongly support non-politicians seeking public office. But what about, you know, her qualifications? What, we’d like to know, has she done in her life that should make us believe she can govern?

( … Listen closely. That deafening silence you hear is the sound of an entire political party attempting to pretend they didn’t hear the question …)

This is the U.S. Senate we’re talking about, though. A famous political name is pretty much all you need to gain entrance. (Read: Byrd. Bayh. Chafee. Dole. And, soon enough, Biden.) But that isn’t the real reason the latest Kennedy is considered the front-runner for the appointment. The real reason is that Democratic party bosses believe she is qualified to be a senator–not because she has the right ideas to lead our country in a better direction, but because she has proven that she can already outdo most career politicians in the one area that matters: fund-raising:

… Mr. Paterson also had come to see Ms. Kennedy as a strong potential candidate whose appointment would keep a woman in the seat and whose personal connections would allow her to raise the roughly $70 million required to hold on to the seat in the coming years.

In other words, who cares if she would actually improve our country or make the right decisions? She’s a loyal Democrat. She’ll vote the party line. And, most importantly, she’ll do the most important work of all: bring in gobs of cash so that the Democratic Party can continue to hold the New York seat. That’s all the qualification the Democrats need.

PS: One of the saner voices in the blogosphere on this issue is actually a normally realiable Democratic partisan, Jane Hamsher over at Firedoglake.