Caroline is a lawyer, JD from Columbia. She is specialized in Constitutional Law, and of her six books, two deal with Civil Rights/Civil Liberties.

Where was she on FISA?

Again, I hope I’m wrong, but the more closely we look at her, this looks like a huge win for Vichy Dems in a blue state in the very blue Northeast.

What bothers some of us here is the inconsistency. We would be up in arms if a Bush with this kind of record was chosen as a Senator but with Caroline Kennedy it seems to be OK. If Caroline’s last name was not Kennedy and she had this résumé, she would not be up for consideration at all. Yet when this point is raised, the burden is put on us to show why she would not be qualified. This last I find truly bizarre since that above all else is Caroline Kennedy’s responsibility. I raised a whole series of issues all important. And as far as I know she has not addressed one of them in a public forum.

In short, what we are seeing is the same old same old. We are being told this is change even though it’s always the same old names.

In the best of all possible worlds, yes, she should run for the House, or for a seat in Albany. Sadly Jerry Nadler seems to want to keep his seat which is where I belive CK lives and votes.

It strikes me everyone believes in apprentiseship here. If you grew up in a very political family, don’t you think your whole life would be something of an apprentiseship — and maybe the thing to do is evaluate it on its own terms?

Her giving in 2007 is to both HRC and Barack. She only endorsed Barack in January 2008.

She appears to be against wind turbines in Nantucket Sound. I’d love to be wrong, but what evidence is there she’s going to stand against torture in the U.S. Senate if she can’t stand up to her neighbors on Cape Cod for a wind farm?

She’s only 51. A couple of years in the House make sense. I hope I’m wrong, because I really think Patterson will appoint her.

As far as the need to “run” for office as a qualifier, this is a bit quixotic. CK will have to run for office to stay in the Senate. The more practical issue is whether she is a sure bet to support BO and the answer seems to be yes. I certainly would much rather have CK in the Senate than HRC, expecially when it comes to important issues.

First — Caroline Kennedy has raised three children, the two girls are in college, in their early 20’s, and he son is sixteen, a senior in High School. If you have read anything at all about the differences of opinion in the Kennedy Clan — one big difference was that Jackie believed in raising your own children, and she was highly critical of Ethel for depending too much on hired help. I think this is one reason why you haven’t seen CK out leading protest marches and the like.

Second — from the time Caroline was about sixteen, Jackie prepared her to take the family seat on the Kennedy Foundation and Library Board. She was tutored for this over a number of years by Ted Sorensen, and he has much about this in his recent book, Counselor. She went on the board in the early 90’s, and changed the direction of the Kennedy Library, which had become dull under the leadership of the Irish Mafia — Dave Powers and Kenny O’Donnell. Her first big project was a three part conference concerning the Cuban Missile Crisis, the first part was held in Havana, second part in Moscow, last session in Cambridge. Working with State and people in the Clinton Administration, and many historians, she got the archives in all three places declassified, and then arranged a host of historians and scholars who could exploit these, and lead the project. There are a fairly large number of books that have emerged from this effort in Russian, Spanish and English. It was a huge undertaking, and the scholars who know what was involved in releasing the documents and all consider Caroline first rate as a negotiator on a sensitive project. In the process of accomplishing this, Caroline also managed to change the focus of the Kennedy Library Board — and the staff it employes, away from the “museum” stuff and toward activist and collaborative policy matters.

Caroline is a lawyer, JD from Columbia. She is specialized in Constitutional Law, and of her six books, two deal with Civil Rights/Civil Liberties. Her actual legal work is part time, and in association with the firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, and she does appeals work on a part time basis. This is combined with her being a member of the board of the NAACP Legal and Educational Foundation, frequently known as the INK fund. This is the group of Civil Rights Attorneys that was first formed in the 1930’s by Thurgood Marshall to do the long series of cases necessary — and today it is the premier group doing appeals work in this field. (It is not the NAACP — different incorporation, different funding.) Caroline’s law firm does much of this work so she has been for more than ten years at the intersection of the two groups. She is not a trial lawyer, she researches and writes appeals briefs.

Since the early part of this decade, she has also been involved with K-12 School Reforms — her particular interest seems to be the Charter School Movement. Because taxes do not support the start up costs for these schools in NYCity — buildings, special equipment and the like — if they are to succeed, they need fundraisers, and CK has raised about a hundred million dollars for NY City Charter Schools. All sorts of studies show that Charters flop big time if they don’t have resources, but if they have proper ones, they can do a great job.

In the Obama Campaign, Caroline’s job was to set up and carry out the Obama Fellows Program. This was the short courses in community organization that was then followed by working all over the country in the various field offices. She did the recruitment, organized the courses, and then had a hand in the placement. Most of the Fellows were recent College Grads or students who took a semester out to work for Obama. They were the backbone of what we called the Ground Game.

Finally the off beat thing that intrigues me that Caroline has done involved working with her Mother on a huge book about Islamic Law and Governance and Art in Mughal India. She spent most of a year in Jaipur India taking classes, and working with scholars and museum people selecting material for the book, and ultimately getting things photographed for the large format production. I knew a political science professor who was in Jaipur on a Fulbright, and overlapped with CK — and he said she was a very serious and respected scholar in that environment.

Personally, I find this effort to bash Caroline very distasteful, because it seems to me that those who follow that tendency are not seriously looking at her work and potential in an honest way. I don’t see the difference between what some are doing and the radio work of Rush and company. Yes — there are questions to be raised as to whether she has what it takes to carry legislation in the Senate — but I remind that Paul Wellstone had been teaching Political Science at a small elite liberal arts college all of his career before running for the Senate. He had never served in elective office before the Senate. Not every Senator needs to work his/her way up the career ladder in state government to be effective in the Senate. There clearly is an advantage in appointing someone with name recognition who can easily raise outside funds to this opening — the estimate is that 70 million might be necessary for the 2010 race plus the 2012 contest. CK would not be depending on DSCC for those funds. Her fundraising would not take away from others in NY in the next two election cycles.