Camelot itch
"The very same media which spent months dismissing former mayor and Gov. Sarah Palin as too inexperienced for national office is now championing a woman whose primary qualification - her only qualification - is her last name," the Media Research Center's L. Brent Bozell writes at www.mrc.org.
"The very same media which still mock Palin's folksy 'you betcha' or her interview with Katie Couric don't seem to notice when John Fund reports that in one 30-minute interview on the cable news channel New York One, Caroline Kennedy used the slang 'you know' a total of 168 times," Mr. Bozell said.
"How will Caroline Kennedy be expected to cast votes in the Senate when she's cared so little about voting as a citizen? Faced with reports that she had missed voting in several New York elections, including the 1994 re-election effort of Sen. Daniel Moynihan (the Senate seat she now expects to be handed like royalty), Kennedy told the Associated Press, 'I was really surprised and dismayed by my voting record. I'm glad it's been brought to my attention.'
"What?"
"There's a long line of New York politicians who are more qualified and more deserving of a Senate seat than this dippy heiress -- even liberal ones. Yet they have to watch this wannabe sound like one of her limo drivers just handed her the dismaying news of her own voting history? You know?
"But the Kennedy-worshiping media elite just can't stop scratching their Camelot itch, showing those ridiculously over-broadcasted home movies of the Kennedy kids, and marveling over Caroline Kennedy's life story."
Deja vu
"If you think Caroline Kennedy is following her family's lead in trying to start at the top in a big job in politics (which has sometimes been referred to as show business for ugly people) with much too much chutzpah and too few credentials, you would be right, but you might also be somewhat mistaken in where the true model might lie," Noemie Emery writes at www.weeklystandard.com.
"True, in 1962 Uncle Ted jumped into the Senate at 30 with naught but his name to commend him, but it is true too and largely forgotten that in 1967 and 1968 Caroline's Aunt Lee, her mother's younger and even more beautiful sister, tried to jump into show business (which might be called politics for good-looking people), through family names, extended connections, and powerful friends," the writer said.
"Substitute Caroline Kennedy for Princess Lee Radziwill; substitute Ted Kennedy and Mayor Mike Bloomberg for Truman Capote; substitute the Senate for the great stage that it sometimes resembles, and you have deja vu all over again, as Yogi Berra once put it: the same reflective celebrity, based on the same woman and family; the same second-hand and borrowed charisma; and the same sad story of rash expectations, and the nemesis hubris can bring." |
