By Jay Gallagher
excerpted from the Poughkeepsie Journal (01/04/09)
It's like, you know, Caroline Kennedy really does want to succeed Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Senate, but there are, like, all these, you know, issues and stuff that can make it seem so hard.
In a round of interviews last weekend, the 51-year-old Manhattan resident and heir to America's most famous political family sounded at times more like she was running for senior-class president than someone hoping to persuade Gov. David Paterson to appoint her to fill out Clinton's term if, as expected, Clinton is confirmed as Barack Obama's secretary of state this month.
Her answers were peppered with the conversational fillers that almost everybody uses, but they made her sound juvenile and unsure of herself.
It got to the point where reporters were counting the totals of "you knows" in her interviews: In one 30-minute session, the total was more than 200, and it was 130 in another and 80 in a third. Nobody even tried to count the "ums."
Of course, who wouldn't be nervous while trying to plunge into politics after a lifetime of mostly avoiding the spotlight since her father was assassinated in 1963, when she was only 5 years old?
But it's like, um, if she got up on the Senate floor and made like, you know, a pitch that New York deserves federal bailout help because, um, you know, New York has taken the brunt of the financial meltdown and, besides, it's not like New York has been treated, you know, fairly by Washington before either. We New Yorkers, you know, have been sending more money to the federal government for, like, decades than we have been like getting back.
Such a performance would seem unlikely to sway many of her colleagues, and not exactly recall Daniel Patrick Moynihan or other distinguished predecessors.
