Since my last com­ments about reruns of Dynasty in the U.S. Senate, Car­o­line Kennedy has not only expressed inter­est in the Senate seat vacated by HRC, but is start­ing to clear the field with polit­i­cal anglings and manuev­er­ings of var­i­ous kinds (includ­ing but cer­tainly not lim­ited to secret phone calls and upstate New York “listening tours”).

Geral­dine Brooks, though, gives us the reason to end all rea­sons for Kennedy’s wor­thi­ness for U.S. sen­a­tor in a Daily Beast column:

She reads. She reads poetry. Anyone who doesn’t think that’s rel­e­vant needs to be reminded of William Carlos Williams’ obser­va­tion: “It is dif­fi­cult to get the news from poems, yet men die mis­er­ably every day for the lack of what is found there.”

While few polit­i­cal respon­si­bil­i­ties strike me as abso­lutist and unde­mo­c­ra­tic as that of a gov­er­nor appoint­ing a U.S. Sen­a­tor to office in the case of a vacant Senate seat, the rank process has smelt to heaven in all three post-​election situations.

Little more needs to be said on Barack Obama’s vacant Senate seat after Bobby’s Cliff­s­Notes ver­sion of the filed crim­i­nal com­plaint against Blago. Might I just point out that Illi­nois res­i­dents knew the score before the latest shock twist: Ras­mussen had Blago’s approval rating in an Octo­ber 13 poll at 4%. Yes, 4%.  A greater per­cent­age of a random sample of people believe that the sun revolves around the earth than approve of the job that Blago is doing in the Spring­field state house.

But the other two seats in play, VP-​Elect Joe Biden’s Senate seat in Delaware and Secretary-of-State-designate Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat in New York, are falling prey to the other kind of cor­rup­tion, i.e., the soft crony­ism of nepotism.

1/ From Michelle Cottle’s “External Flame,” at The New Repub­lic this week:

[T]his alliance may be an even shrewder move for [Car­o­line] Kennedy Schloss­berg than for [Barack] Obama. It’s been 45 years since the fall of Camelot, and the family brand has begun to fade. A grow­ing por­tion of the elec­torate was born after the deaths of John and Bobby and has a tough time relat­ing to the Kennedy fix­a­tion of its elders. Under such con­di­tions, what’s a com­mit­ted cus­to­dian of the family legacy to do? Hitch her clan’s wagon to the hottest polit­i­cal star in decades. With a little luck, even as that old Camelot magic rubs off on Obama, the candidate’s energy and rel­e­vance will help sus­tain the Kennedy brand for a little longer.

2/ From my Feb­ru­ary Chicago Tri­bune arti­cle (PDF) on the Kennedy Obama endorsements:

The Kennedy name is the gold stan­dard in Demo­c­ra­tic pol­i­tics, and it will remain so as long as John Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion is a part of living memory. But the youngest people to vote for him in 1960 are 68 today, and seven out of eight Amer­i­cans are too young to remem­ber him as any­thing more than a his­tor­i­cal figure, no more or less real than Roo­sevelt, Lin­coln or Jefferson.

Edward Kennedy him­self is 75. Besides his son, no third-​generation Kennedy holds national office.

And thus, when Kennedy said Obama would not be trapped by the pat­terns of the past, it might not be because he was com­i­cally or trag­i­cally unaware of his own or his family’s posi­tion. It might be exactly the oppo­site: Per­haps he was too aware of that posi­tion. If that’s the case, then last week’s endorse­ments should be seen as an acknowl­edg­ment of just how frag­ile the pat­terns of the past can be.

By mid­night Tues­day [i.e. Feb­ru­ary 5], after more than 20 states have weighed in on the Obama-​Clinton race, we’ll have a better sense of how the Kennedy cal­cu­lus affects the elec­tion in the
short run….

But in the long run, I wouldn’t be sur­prised if the endorse­ments do as much to help the Kennedys as they do to help Obama. Cast­ing Obama in the Kennedy mold offers him author­ity, but it also offers the Kennedys a future, a way to keep the mys­tique alive.

QUICK UPDATE (7/1): Don’t worry, the irony is not lost on me.