Spin Cycle

Wayne Barrett of the Village Voice has just posted an item full of new details on Michael Bloomberg's behind the scenes effort to boost Caroline Kennedy. ">Of interest:

1. Barrett thinks that if Kennedy gets the seat through his patronage, Bloomberg will have effectively blocked any possibility of an Obama-backed Democrat running against him next year.

2. Barrett finds no sign that Caroline Kennedy ever backed Democrat Fernando Ferrer for mayor and evidence that she appeared at a Bloomberg event, which is a strange posture for a candidate who wants Democrats to put her in the Senate.

3. Bloomberg's biggest service to Kennedy may be his help exaggerating her "work" for the NYC schools:

"Volunteering, like the mayor, for a dollar a year, she is said to have worked three days a week fundraising for city schools. But what few seem to have noticed is that Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein announced her appointment in October 2002, Klein said it would become a fulltime position in 2003, but it never did. When she left halfway through 2004, education reporter David Herszenhorn from the Times wrote:

" 'But while Ms. Kennedy generated excitement among donors and often met personally with them, several school officials and acquaintances said she was never entirely comfortable within the bureaucracy of the nation's largest school system. For months after she started, even some high-level education officials said they were not quite sure what she did. In an interview about eight months into her tenure, she would not say how often she worked at the department headquarters or how many hours she spent on the job, saying only, 'I put in as much time as I can.' '

"In fact, one of Kennedy's main jobs as chief executive of the Office of Strategic Partnerships was to oversee the Fund for Public Schools, the public/private partnership that raised hundreds of millions under Bloomberg. The Fund's tax-exempt filings with the Internal Revenue Service listed her as working one hour a week for the Fund in 2003 and two hours in 2004, the years she was at DOE. She has remained a vice chair of the Fund, which is also represented by Isay and is chaired by Klein, and has more recently continued to do two hours a week of service, according to the filing. Lara Holliday, a spokeswoman for the Fund, said that the hourly estimate was 'a reporting procedure' that 'doesn't reflect' Kennedy's far more extensive efforts while she was on staff and since. Mort Zuckerman, the owner of the Daily News, and Wendi Murdoch, the wife of Rupert Murdoch, sit on this small board with her."

There's more. But basically, it sounds like Caroline's work has involved hanging out with rich people and power players. That's what her "campaign" looks like so far. And it's probably what she figures you do as a Senator.