Saturday, December 20, 2008

What You Don't Know About Caroline Kennedy

A very interesting read via debtov at The Albany Project, concerning Wayne Barrett's excellent article at the Village Voice involving the political connection between Kennedy and Mayor Bloomberg. The Barrett article details so many characters and alliances, it reads like a Mafia Don novel and contains some very interesting information about Caroline's padded resume.

The most tawdry part of the Bloomberg cheerleading, however, has been the exaggeration of the Kennedy resume. Aside from Caroline's books--some of which have been collections of her mother's favorite poems and other people's essays--the only significant career accomplishment is the two months she worked part-time at Bloomberg's Department of Education. Volunteering, like the mayor, for a dollar a year, she is said to have worked three days a week fundraising for city schools. But what few seem to have noticed is that Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein announced her appointment in October 2002, Klein said it would become a fulltime position in 2003, but it never did. When she left halfway through 2004, education reporter David Herszenhorn from the Times wrote:

"But while Ms. Kennedy generated excitement among donors and often met personally with them, several school officials and acquaintances said she was never entirely comfortable within the bureaucracy of the nation's largest school system. For months after she started, even some high-level education officials said they were not quite sure what she did. In an interview about eight months into her tenure, she would not say how often she worked at the department headquarters or how many hours she spent on the job, saying only, 'I put in as much time as I can.'"

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