The truer and more profound backstory to Caroline Kennedy’s unexpected run for the Senate might not be, as the Times nearly swoons this morning, about the existential dreadfulness of there being no Kennedys in the Senate, but about empty-nest syndrome. Her children are all but out of the house. Indeed, she is in that particularly panicked and teary moment of having two out and one left, shortly to go—a position in which I find myself. If I could grab a Senate seat in an effort to soothe my bereftness at the imminent end of parenthood, I would too.
Caroline Kennedy has represented through the last 50 years, not just the lost first family, but a sense of baby-boomer aging and mortality. For a long time, in decades past, you could see her on magazine covers on the newsstand and instantly feel good, and then, rather all of a sudden, seeing her started to make you feel sad. Not just for her, but for ourselves. The facts were unavoidable—all the more so because she never said anything; she mutely let age happen to her.
(AP Image)
Hence, now, if you are of a baby-boomer age, you’re not just taken with the storybook nature of her sudden ambition, but with the fact that she’s going out and getting a dramatic new life for herself. She’s reinventing, which is more prosaic than carrying the Camelot flame, but, in a way, more sympathetic and compelling.
Hillary Clinton used this Senate seat to be something other than a humiliated wife who’d put her career aside for a humiliating husband. Daniel Patrick Moynihan used it to be a man of action, rather than mere intellectual. Robert Kennedy to recover from his grief. So Caroline Kennedy might use it now to rise from the ashes of middle age—as we all wish we could.
All right, not a good enough reason to give her the job. But I get why she wants it.
