Peggy: Caroline’s Too Ordinary

Veteran political observer Peggy Noonan has some rare words of wisdom about Caroline’s bid for Hillary’s Senate seat: “If you’re going to run as the princess of a dynasty, you have to act and be like a princess…Her problem in part has been that she spent a quarter-century trying to blend in and not call attention to herself. She made herself convincingly average—not distinguished. She has her parents’ dignity but not their dash. She radiates a certain clueless class.” Caroline’s difficulty? “To succeed as a candidate…she needed the talents of an extremely gifted natural, which she’s not...Hillary Clinton understood that New York demands glamour. She had less natural clay to work with, and yet she got in the stylists and makeup artists and through her enormous self-discipline transformed herself into a chic, well groomed, bustling little engine that could.” And our love affair with the Kennedys was all a long time ago. “JFK went to Dallas 45 years ago last November. It is as if Jenna Bush…decided in the year 2053 to run for office…saying ‘I’m a Bush.’ The reaction, one assumes, would be: So what?”