Caroline Kennedy for U.S. Senate

Politico has a story up now titled "Nepotism Nation: Dems embrace dynasty politics." It details just how familiar the names being put forward to fill the Senate seats being  vacated by the Obama brain drain are. Go ahead and read the article for all the gory details, but MSNBC's Chuck Todd made the point first and more succinctly:

Could the four Democrats seeking Senate seats in the four Obama-presidential related vacancies all be relatives of famous politicos in their home states: John Salazar in Colorado, brother of Ken? Beau Biden in Delaware (in 2010, once he gets back from Iraq), son of Joe? Lisa Madigan in Illinois, daughter of Assembly Speaker Michael? And Caroline Kennedy in New York, well, you know who she is, right?

Why does this matter? Well the GOP is going to need every bullet we can get are hands on if we hope to make up ground in the Senate in 2010. Reinforcing an already existing 'Dynasty Dems' meme in the media will be a great theme to build on. Obama's operating coalition is ripe for an attack along these lines. In his first post-election analysis Michael Barone observed:

The top and bottom coalition. Obama led among those with incomes under $50,000 (big) and those above $200,000 (narrowly). Among the 56 percent with incomes in the middle, it was pretty much even. Similarly, Obama won 63 percent among those with no high school education and 58 percent among those with postgraduate degrees but led only very narrowly among those in between. That's reflected in the finding that McCain did better with noncollege whites (58 percent-40 percent) than college whites (51 percent-47 percent). At the moment, this top-and-bottom coalition outnumbers the broad middle. But if the political balance tips, it could be the other way around.

The first politician that I've observed assemble a top-and-bottom coalition was Mayor John Lindsay of New York. He started off as a Republican, a very liberal one, and won the mayoralty in 1965 and 1969 with coalitions of affluent Manhattan whites on the one hand and blacks and Latinos on the other. In both elections, he won with a plurality of the vote and was behind in the four outer boroughs taken together. Lindsay championed soft policies (in the sense of the word in my book Hard America, Soft America) on crime and welfare that produced disaster in New York and in other cities where such policies were followed. Those policies answered the demands of both sides of his top-and-bottom coalition: The top wanted generous policies toward the poor that made them feel good about themselves, the bottom wanted short-term money transfers and leniency toward criminals in their midst. The top paid a small price for the results of these policies; the bottom paid a very large one.

A similar outcome is entirely possible under Obama. Obama's rich supporters on the coasts want to pass global warming legislation that will make them feel better about themselves as they jet back and forth over the rest of the country struggling to survive under huge new energy taxes. The fact that many of the Senators passing this legislation are part of wealthy Dem Dynasties can only help our candidates.