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Since Hillary Clinton is going to the State Department, someone needs to take her Senate seat, For some reason Caroline Kennedy’s name has come up. As a result, Richard Bradley at Slate decided to write a wonderfully random heavy-handed takedown of Caroline the likes of which I haven’t seen since Jonathan Chait drove through Delaware.

I can’t imagine Caroline Kennedy campaigning for the job of U.S. senator through traditional methods: shaking hands outside factory gates on a cold winter morning, granting interviews to reporters other than sycophantic morning-show hosts, explaining and defending her positions on the issues of the day.

[...] Kennedy would become senator simply by doing something at which she has long excelled: working the phones with powerful people who take her calls because of her last name.

[...] As an adult, she has tended to work at jobs that didn’t require her to work all that hard and didn’t require her to mingle with ordinary people.

If that’s not enough, Bradley mixes in some personal gossip about Caroline:

Before my book American Son, about working with John Kennedy Jr. at George magazine, was published in 2002, surrogates of Caroline tried to prevent its publication. They failed, but it was ugly stuff. If Caroline Kennedy didn’t know the specifics of their efforts—which ranged from threatening my original publisher to planting negative stories about me in the media—she certainly knew of their existence.

And manages to fit in some tawdry insinuations while he’s at it:

In a recent column, Michael Wolff tells a story about Kennedy catching wind of a New York Post inquiry about the alleged misbehavior of one of her children. So, Wolff writes, Kennedy called an aide to Rupert Murdoch, and the Post’s owner had the story killed. In turn, Kennedy wrote a letter of recommendation for Murdoch’s daughter to Brearley, an exclusive private school in Manhattan.

Dun-dun-DUN!

After having someone devote an article to trashing her entire life I’m pretty sympathetic towards Caroline Kennedy but after all the gushingly romantic coverage, some of it needed to be said. I’m sure she’s a wonderful person, but what qualifies her for political office other than her last name? Yes, Ted Kennedy won’t be around much longer, but there are 100 Senate seats for 300 million people in this country. There’s no reason we have to reserve a seat for one family, and to defend the practice under the guise of ‘tradition’ is utter bullshit.

In other news, it appears that Richard Bradley’s brand of anti-Kennedy invective is contagious. The internet - It’s the perfect place to get mad for no reason.