Gov. David A. Paterson bypassed a couple of better-known contenders yesterday and appointed Kirsten Gillibrand, a low-profile congresswoman from the rural, conservative Hudson Valley, to New York's open Senate seat. Caroline Kennedy at the last minute dropped out of consideration, but was she ever a contender?
Patterson may have been the savvy one as his primary goal perhaps was to shore up his own position and balance the Democratic ticket for 2010, which will see the governor, the appointed senator, and the state's senior senator, Charles E. Schumer, on the ballot and in his corner...Caroline Kennedy, the only surviving child of president John F. Kennedy, and Andrew M. Cuomo, the state's popular attorney general, were considered the early front-runners for the seat vacated by Hillary Rodham Clinton, who became secretary of state. In choosing Gillibrand, Paterson may have gained allies among women and Upstate voters. But he has also angered backers of Kennedy and Cuomo, alienated some key constituencies, and made it more likely that he and Gillibrand may both face primary challenges next year.
The Gillibrand appointment, which came after an excruciating and at times haphazard two-month selection process, may have been the most high-profile decision to date for Paterson, who is in many ways an accidental governor, coming to office last year after Eliot L. Spitzer resigned because of a sex scandal. "Everyone in town is furious with him," vented one Kennedy friend, who called the selection process, which included Kennedy's mysterious eleventh-hour withdrawal for unspecified personal reasons, "a fiasco."
Gillibrand's centrist voting record sets her at odds with most of her Democratic colleagues in New York. See Keith B. Richburg at the washingtonpost.com has the rest of this story