The Kennedy Clones: Camelot--The Next Generation

One by one and two by two a new generation of Kennedys arrives, in all manner of shapes, sizes and genders, offering themselves up for public service. Is it noblesse oblige? Or is it naked ambition? Or, for that matter, could it be about having little else to do but trade on the family name?

The Kennedy progeny are scattered like pinpricks across the map, from New York to New England and south to Maryland, as they continue their drive to expand the family franchise.

There's Andrew Cuomo, a political princeling in his own right, but nonetheless married to Kerry Kennedy and parked, at least temporarily, at a family law firm in New York?Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson?the connection being the Shriver, as in Sargent Shriver, husband of Eunice (nee Kennedy) Shriver. And it doesn't hurt that Kerry Kennedy's father, the slain Robert F., represented New York in the U.S. Senate.

To the south there's Kerry Kennedy Cuomo's sister, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Maryland's lieutenant governor and senior child of Robert, who's stretching for a resume upgrade to governor. And she'll be partnering on next year's Maryland ballot with cousin Mark Shriver, son of Sargent and a member of Maryland's House of Delegates, who's announced he's running for Congress where cousin Patrick now sits.

And the newest among the arrivals and departures is Max, 36, another of Robert's offspring, who's materialized out of the vapors and wants to succeed Rep. Joseph Moakley from Massachusetts' 9th Congressional District. Moakley is suffering from a lethal form of leukemia and is retiring from the seat he's held for 15 terms.

At a recent testimonial for Moakley, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's prepared text contained a giggle-line thanking Moakley for "keeping that congressional seat warm for 29 years for Max," according to the Boston Globe. The line was not delivered.

The decks were cleared for Max when Joseph Kennedy II, a former Congressman, decided not to run for governor of Massachusetts. Max Kennedy has made the obligatory pilgrimage to Moakley's office, and Moakley appears to be favoring Max over all other comers, even though Max doesn't live in Boston's Southside 9th District, but is shopping for real estate in the appropriate zip code.

Moakley and many of his aides and allies are lining up behind Kennedy, even though three other Democrats have formed committees or expressed interest in running?State Sens. Brian A. Joyce and Marc R. Pacheco, as well as Joseph F. Timilty.

"Max better hope the moving van doesn't break down before Joe Moakley dies," says Howie Carr, a Boston Herald columnist and syndicated talk show host on ABC Radio.

In neighboring Rhode Island, four-term Rep. Patrick Kennedy, son of Teddy Kennedy, a member of the Senate since 1962, is in deep dip. "Patches," as Carr refers to Patrick Kennedy, is sinking like a rock in the polls, so he's engaged a public relations firm to resuscitate his political fortunes after a series of frat-boy botches and blunders.

And again in New York, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is busy rescuing rivers through his foundation, Hudson Riverkeeper, but could probably win any office in the state if it weren't for his alleged priapic behavior. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was the Democratic party's preference for the U.S. Senate before Hillary Clinton interloped into the New York scene.

Then again, the publicity surrounding the murder trial of Michael Skakel in Connecticut won't help burnish the Kennedy nameplate, since his name is inevitably followed by the misleading phrase, "a Kennedy relative."

So where do these Kennedys get off playing elective politics like it's a family board game?

"It's astounding that they have the chutzpah to do this," says Carr, a longtime Kennedy watcher. "And it's even more astounding that the public lets them get away with it."

 

For Cuomo, as students of human motivation will quickly grasp, the drive may be part political and part personal: retribution for his father Mario's humiliating defeat seven years ago to George Pataki. Cuomo had been assisting his father in New York's precincts and in the governor's office since he was 17. Cuomo's family is staying behind in the Washington, DC, area until school's over, while Cuomo searches for agreeable housing in Manhattan.

Republican Gov. Pataki appears to be losing his grip, so into the breach steps Cuomo to reclaim the family jewels for the Democrats. Cuomo has competition, though, in the form of state Comptroller Carl McCall. And, according to well-placed sources who invoked anonymity, Republicans are ready to pursue the trail of glossy self-promotional publications (paid for by the government) and controversial housing grants?not to the mention departmental disarray?that Cuomo left behind as secretary of HUD.

Cuomo also left a trail of bad paper in Baltimore, where he ladled hundreds of millions of dollars of HUD money into programs that went either bad or nowhere. One boondoggle involved the award of $26 million in non-bid contracts to friends and relatives of former Mayor Kurt Schmoke and housing commissioner Daniel Henson. A recent HUD inspector general's report, for example, criticized the city's Section 8 housing program under Cuomo's HUD as entirely corrupt and totally dysfunctional. While he was HUD secretary, Cuomo blocked a scheduled audit of Baltimore's housing department.

And recently, Cuomo got off to a bad campaign start. He offended Hispanic Democrats by failing to appear at a heavily populated gathering in Albany, according to a report in the New York Post. The same event attracted Pataki as well as Sen. Hillary Clinton.

 

Max Kennedy's political resume is blank. He's an attorney who runs another of those family nonprofit corporations, this one a goo-goo eco-corp called the Watershed Institute, funded in part by his wife's family money (she's a Strauss). According to a Boston Globe story on March 22, Max was unable to recall what year he graduated from law school, or exactly what he's a resident of. Yet by all accounts, the Kennedy family political powerhouse will force out the competition to clear a pathway for Max.

"Moakley's is an open seat," says Carr. "[Max] Kennedy's unemployed and just another dope who's never held a job. He's totally unqualified for a job that's going to be handed to him."

Patrick Kennedy has become the newest family bad boy. His First Congressional District in Rhode Island brackets the industrial north as well as the gilded Gatsby sands and swards to the south. So now Kennedy's in the tank for a series of antics and for neglecting his homeboy obligations while traversing the country, vacuuming up money for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

"Patches" often behaves with all the finesse of bulls running at Pamplona. He admitted that he took prescription drugs for depression, and was accused of assaulting an airport security officer who attempted to prevent him from stuffing an oversized suitcase into a metal-detector machine. Next came reports that he trashed a rented yacht to the tune of $28,000. Finally, a Coast Guard boat came to the rescue when he had an argument with a girlfriend on the same rented yacht. All of this is according to Fox News and the Providence Journal.

As a result, his favorable rating in the polls has dropped from a high of 63 percent to below 50 percent, the demarcation line for vulnerability.

 

In Maryland, the Kennedys' route to institutional advancement is more complex. For Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, biology is destiny. She's the first woman this, and the first woman that.

But now her future turns on a matter of family protocol in the dynastic Kennedy cruise for public office. Townsend's on the escalator to a higher calling, while her cousin Mark K. Shriver wants to move onward and upward, to Congress.

They are opposites, even though they are kissing cousins. She's the oldest (woman) child of Robert F. Kennedy; he's the number one son of Sargent and Eunice (Kennedy) Shriver and brother of tv babe Maria. She's (the first woman) lieutenant governor of Maryland; he's a member of the state's House of Delegates. They live a couple of counties apart, she in a leafy suburb outside of Baltimore, and he in the haute zip code of inside-the-Beltway Bethesda.

Townsend at this point has little or no opposition in her grab for the Maryland governorship, but Shriver has a thunderhead on the horizon. Here their lives intersect?a gesture of cousinly courtesy on Townsend's part could give Shriver's call-waiting candidacy just the juice that it needs.

Shriver has a problem, a big problem, that maybe only Cousin Kathleen can solve: Christopher Van Hollen Jr., a Maryland state senator who's making noises about running for the same Congressional seat that Shriver has his baby-blues fastened on. But secretly, as every political hobbyist in Maryland knows, Van Hollen would settle?ever prefer?to be second banana on Townsend's ticket in her run for governor next year. Will she make him the offer?

"Mark and Kathleen are a contrast in styles," says Blair Lee IV, a Montgomery County political commentator and himself the son of Maryland's first modern-day lieutenant governor, Blair Lee III. "She's running on the Kennedy in her middle name, and Mark has substituted the initial 'K' for his legitimate given middle name of Kennedy. She arrived in Maryland in the 1980s, unpacked her bags and ran for Congress [and lost]. Mark was born and raised in Maryland, and when he decided to get into politics he started an anti-poverty program in the worst slums of Baltimore."

Shriver has the Kennedy look, all teeth and hair. And around the State House, he's considered a bright, hard-working, liberal good-guy who once founded and ran the hard-edged "Choice" program in Baltimore to rehabilitate errant inner-city youths. If he has a fault, according to colleagues, it's that he can't say no to a worthy cause. Shriver went to Holy Cross College and Harvard University. As Lee notes, he doesn't play the Kennedy card at all: in his first campaign for the House of Delegates he was never heard to mention the name a single time. In fact, in his first political outing, he refused to allow his parents to attend his announcement.

A flight of State House marble stairs above the House chamber sits Cousin Kathleen amid the tchotchkes of her rank?State Police bodyguards, a staff of 16 that includes speechwriters, schedulers and political operatives. Her powers of office are visible and invisible, and among the unseen and unassigned is the ability to help propel Mark to Congress. Townsend, too, went to Harvard, and has a law degree from the University of New Mexico. Unlike Shriver, though, Townsend formally appropriated the Kennedy name upon entering public service. She regularly accompanies her mother, Ethel, at political events.

Lee says that perhaps the greatest difference between Townsend and Shriver is that "She's ill-at-ease and distant around people, and Shriver has the [Kennedy] family schmooze ability and loves politics."

Confounding the protocol standoff between the cousins is Van Hollen, also a public official whose Q-factor ranks right up there with Shriver's. He's a highly regarded state senator with a trail of alphabet soup behind his name?Swarthmore College, Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, Georgetown University Law School and tours as a staffer on Capitol Hill and in Maryland's State House as an aide to the governor. That's Montgomery County for you.

The conundrum is that either Shriver or Van Hollen would be a welcome addition to the state's 10-member Congressional delegation, and worthy of representing the egghead county of Montgomery. And what Van Hollen lacks in Shriver's star quality, he more than compensates for in experience. And Townsend needs a running mate from Montgomery County to prop up her ticket in that most populous of Maryland subdivisions.

Only Sen. Edward M. Kennedy and his nephew, Joseph, have had to make a choice like the one confronting Townsend: they are the only two Kennedys who have ever run in the same election in the same state. Kennedys usually wait in line as part of the family pecking order. Joseph Jr. was the anointed oldest son until he was killed in WWII. He was followed in the family business by John F. Kennedy, who preceded Edward F. Kennedy and later Robert F. Kennedy, whose children now populate several public offices.

When Edward Kennedy and Joseph Kennedy ran in Massachusetts, they were part of the same political organism. But in Maryland, Townsend and Shriver are running with two different names, for two different offices at two different levels, she for state office and he for the west side of Montgomery County.

Townsend is the one person who can execute a preemptive strike to assist her cousin by reaching out to Van Hollen, removing him from Shriver's path. Until and unless that magic moment arrives, Shriver and Van Hollen are behaving like two canines, circling and sniffing, trying to decide whether to make love or war.

 

Regarding the Kennedys, Maryland may be the odd state out. Other states are beginning to exhibit signs of Kennedy fatigue. As the Democrats' in-the-pocket dream-state, Maryland is chock-a-block with Kennedy totems and shrines, and has a constituency that still worships the family and adores its liberal agenda. That Townsend's and Shriver's last names are different helps promote even higher Kennedy tolerance.

So the question is, does America still know a political bargain when it sees one? Kennedys, after all, are cheaper by the dozen.