Caroline Kennedy launched a full-bore campaign Monday to replace Hillary Rodham Clinton in the U.S. Senate, calling New York's governor and other key Democrats to press her desire to extend the family dynasty.
Kennedy reached Gov. David A. Paterson on Monday afternoon as he toured weather-battered portions of upstate New York. "She'd like at some point to sit down and tell me what she thinks her qualifications are," said Paterson, who will choose Clinton's successor.
Kennedy, 51, has hired a team of seasoned political professionals, including operatives close to organized labor and New York's senior U.S. senator, Democrat Charles E. Schumer.
"She has started on a full footing here," said George Arzt, a strategist who works for another Democratic Senate hopeful from Manhattan's East Side, U.S. Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney.
If Kennedy gets the Senate seat, Arzt noted, she would be following New York's "tendency to go for the glitz and the glamour rather than people who had the track record and . . . have come up through the ranks." Some were new to the state, including Clinton, who was first elected senator in 2000, and Kennedy's uncle, the late Robert F. Kennedy, who won his Senate seat in 1964.
But Mitchell Moss, a New York University urban policy professor, said Caroline Kennedy "has a platinum name and enormous appeal to New Yorkers."
"She brings energy and charisma," Moss said. "She brings immediate access to President Obama" and would carry the stature to overcome many of the challenges that a rookie senator would face.
Kennedy, who spent nearly three years as a little girl in the White House, has shied away from public attention most of her life. But she assumed a much higher political profile over the last year, endorsing Barack Obama at a key stage of the presidential race and helping oversee the selection of his vice presidential running mate. She did so in part, she said, because Obama inspired her three children the way earlier generations were inspired by her father, President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1963.
A resident of Manhattan's Upper East Side, Kennedy has never held elected office. But the Ivy League-educated lawyer has devoted years to charitable works and other activities associated with her family and public service. If chosen, she would take her place on Capitol Hill alongside another uncle, Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, and a cousin, Democratic Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy of Rhode Island. Another cousin, Joseph P. Kennedy II, served 12 years in the House representing Massachusetts.
