Will Kennedy spotlight dim Schumer's?
By GLENN THRUSH | 12/9/08 4:26 AM EST
Sen. Chuck Schumer at the Brookings Institution
Schumer is getting out the word that his ego could survive the replacement of one celebrity junior senator with another.
Photo: AP
Sen. Charles B. Schumer is getting out the word that, yes, his ego could survive the replacement of one oxygen-sucking celebrity junior senator, Hillary Rodham Clinton, with another, Caroline Kennedy.
“
not endorsing Caroline — or anybody else — but has told people he wouldn’t mind her being appointed; he has no problem with that,” said a Schumer confidant, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“I don’t think he gives a s—- who gets it at this point, to tell you the truth,” said another longtime Schumer friend who conceded that the No. 3 Democrat in the Senate spent years obsessing over Clinton’s fame before coming to grips with her celebrity.
“He’s in a completely different place now than he was six or eight years ago,” the person added. “He feels like he made his bones, that he already dealt with a celebrity senator and could handle another one, no problem.”
Schumer, New York’s senior senator and mastermind of the Democrats’ gains in the upper chamber as chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, has spent eight years working alongside Clinton — a far more pedigreed, if arguably less accomplished, legislator than he is.
Schumer struggled with the attention paid to Clinton at first but gradually adjusted, becoming one of her most dedicated and dogged surrogates as she made her run for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Then, just as he began to adjust to a post-Hillary world — Clinton is headed to Barack Obama’s State Department — along comes Caroline Kennedy, the glamorous, instantly viable representative of an even more famous political dynasty.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1208/16341.html