Outlook Very Bleak for Caroline Kennedy Senate Appointment

To the naked eye, the fight to seat Caroline Kennedy as Hillary Clinton's successor in the Senate may look like a see-saw battle, but in reality, it has been pretty one-sided. The media, with the aid of Kennedy supporters, has been pushing down hard on Caroline's side of the teeter-totter, but the other side hasn't really budged.

My sources, and the Governor's office, have consistently refuted reports that Caroline was a shoo-in. One source even told me, "The Associated Press has embarassed itself twice now, getting it wrong. (Their sources) are badly misinformed."

What I'm hearing today is even less encouraging for Ms. Kennedy's chances at the seat.

One source close to the situation tells me that the Governor's decision will be "based more on the current perspective, as opposed to the historical perspective." He went on to say that "she's been given a fair shake by the public, by the media, and now she can be judged based on what we've seen in the past few months, not what we've hoped for over the last 30 years."

It also appears that the appointment will be made after the Inauguration, not before. The Governor is "hoping to get a little leeway with this while the Inauguration's going on."

Another bad sign is the absence of pressure from the President-Elect's office. While there was a considerable push when Kennedy's appointment was first floated, there has been nothing since. That initial surge of muscle behind Kennedy seems to have hurt more than it helped. The Governor viewed it as an "unwelcome distraction," and the public pushed back against what many of them saw as a coronation.

While I haven't been able to pin down a front-runner, I can tell you that since my first reporting on this, I haven't been able to get a single source to bite at Andrew Cuomo. In fact, one told me, rather pointedly, that there are a lot of good candidates in New York, and that no one family has a monopoly on good ideas.

Everyone is being very cagey about this, even off the record, so while nobody will name a front-runner, there is only one name that I've heard over and over again: Kirsten Gillibrand. The Congresswoman from the 20th District is a Hillary Clinton protege, who won re-election in a landslide in 2008.

I like Gillibrand's chances, and picking a Hillary loyalist would be good politics. On the other hand, Gillibrand is a Blue Dog, more conservative on many issues. Caroline Kennedy would be a reliably liberal pick. With all of the aisle-reaching these days, it would be nice to shore up the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.

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