COMMENTARY
Rod Watson: Kennedy is listening to wrong folks
Who says Camelot kid Caroline Kennedy isn’t ready to be a big-time politician representing New York in the U. S. Senate?
She doesn’t even have the job yet, and she’s already acting like a seasoned insider.
In her first visit to Buffalo and upstate since trying to clear the field by clearing her throat on a phone call to the governor, Kennedy went on a “listening tour” by listening first to political insiders in private meetings.
You can’t get any more “seasoned” than that.
No average Western New Yorkers expressing kitchen table concerns. Not much of a give-and-take with pesky reporters asking questions that working stiffs might want answers to. Instead, it’s mostly private sit-downs with political pooh-bahs, just like a veteran insider.
It’s that kind of seasoning that has cooked our goose as a region.
Her visit was arranged as Kennedy apparently leads the governor’s shortlist to fill the seat Hillary Clinton will vacate to become secretary of state. But if the Democratic superstar wants to start at the top despite never holding office at any level of government, the least she could do is pretend to be a different kind of politician.
If she really wants to know upstate, she could adapt the model of the senator she wants to work with and the one she wants to replace. Both Chuck Schumer and Clinton made a point of visiting every county in the state. Kennedy could make a point of visiting every one of the 939 cities, counties, towns, villages, school districts and other assorted taxing entities in Erie County.
That kind of listening tour would give her an idea of the level of duplication, inequity, patronage, inefficiency and downright waste that exists — even as those entities now anticipate raising taxes to make up for state cuts.
After all, she won’t hear about our glut of politicians from the politicians. But maybe after hearing it from taxpayers, she could find federal incentive money to offer as leverage to build the region from the core out while shrinking the levels of overlapping bureaucracy.
Or she could have stopped at one of the local auto plants where workers are on edge about the possibility of being out on the street as Washington dithers over a bailout. Ditching the politicos and listening to assembly line workers would give her a much better appreciation of this area’s reliance on the auto industry, which experts say accounts for about 8,200 jobs here plus perhaps twice that number in related industries.
Politicians can tell her what an industry collapse would mean to the budgets they put on paper. Workers could tell her what it would mean to their spouses and children.
If she had hung around until Saturday, she could have visited the annual Christmas party hosted by the FATHERS organization. She’d see bright-eyed kids for whom the kindness of strangers has to substitute for Santa Claus. They come from families who can’t afford the kind of experience every child should have at home this time of year.
That’s the only way to grasp what it’s like to live in the third-poorest big city in the nation. You can’t feel it by sitting in the mayor’s office.
Or she could have ditched her limo and taken the Metro Rail downtown, rubbing elbows with the folks for whom a possible 33 percent fare hike puts a real hole in the monthly budget. These aren’t people who can cut back on a Starbucks to make up the difference.
In short, there are a lot of folks with a lot of stories to tell anyone who needs a crash course on the issues a New York senator needs to address. It’s just too bad Kennedy didn’t hear any of them on her listening tour.
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