Can you say ‘Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York’? Good, because now you’ll have to. Governor Paterson selected the upstate, gun-loving Blue Dog Clinton protégé, and will formally announce her DLC-ass at a noon press conference.
To be fair, Gillibrand isn’t all that bad. I’m not much interested in federal gun control, so her ‘A’ rating from the NRA doesn’t bother me much. She’s more free trade than I am and less committed to protecting civil liberties than I would like. But her voting record is fairly moderate (she clocks in at 167 on the lifetime Progressive Punch chart). In comparison, Carolyn McCarthy (who has promised to run against Gillibrand in the 2010 primary because of gun control issues), has a lifetime score of 192. Just because someone is part of the Blue Dog caucus doesn’t mean that they vote like a southern Blue Dog. Gillibrand is going to vote a lot like Clinton did and a lot like Schumer does. And that’s not all the bad.
The problem is not that Gillibrand is terrible but that we just lost an excellent chance to expand the progressive caucus in the Senate. We’ve been doing well lately with Bernie Sanders and Sherrod Brown two years ago and Tom Udall, Jeff Merkley, and Al Franken this time around. We could have benefited greatly from either Caroline Kennedy or Jerry Nadler. I’ll never fully understand why the progressive blogosphere went apeshit about the possibility of another Senator Kennedy. Mainly I think certain people were trying to be holier than thou without thinking things through.
So, no liberal senator for you!! Get that? You take the Clintonista and you like it!!