In this series, which started in July ‘08, wowOwow follows the political news swirling around Caroline Kennedy since her surprise endorsement of Barack Obama and high-profile placement on his VP selection committee. Now, Caroline is ready to launch a political career of her own. With the Caroline Kennedy Candidacy Watch, we’ll follow all the latest news.

Gov. David Paterson may have let a number of people down during his selection of someone to replace Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat. Not least of all is Caroline Kennedy, who dropped out of the race approximately 24 hours before he announced his decision.

Paterson said Kennedy’s decision was her own, but still won’t say whether he would have picked her had she stayed in the race. "She had gotten no signal from me that she had to withdraw, and no signal from me that she wouldn’t be selected," he said. "The reality is that she is a great New Yorker, a great friend of mine, and there was nothing that would have prohibited her from serving."

New York Magazine says that Paterson’s delay in announcing his pick was a big contributor to Kennedy’s downward spiral of public opinion. Just to add to the confusion, some also are saying that he was telling different contenders that they were his top pick.

"If he would have named someone early on, people would have gotten behind it," one state political strategist told the magazine midway through the saga. "Instead, not only didn’t he pick someone, he went in reverse — he told [American Federation of Teachers President] Randi Weingarten maybe she should be senator. He meets with [former four-term Watergate-era Brooklyn congresswoman] Liz Holtzman, who actually thinks she can be a senator now. So now people have to rip the front-runner. Because in this campaign, you can’t be seen as openly promoting yourself, so all you can do is the negative part, making sure your surrogates, or unnamed sources, are ripping the sh*t out of the other people."

Kennedy’s people were reportedly enraged by Paterson when he still hadn’t named her by Christmas, and as media reports became more negative. But how much did Kennedy really want the job anyway? The February 2 issue of The New Yorker says that just before Christmas, Kennedy was panicky when asked about going to the Senate:

Even before things started to go sour, in other words, she was apprehensive about what lay ahead. Then, a week or two later, after the tabloids and the upstate papers had at her, she attended another friend’s birthday party and looked as though she’d just disembarked from a very steep and terrifying roller coaster: shaken, startled, roughed up."

So what’s Kennedy doing now? She’s telling friends she won’t leave the public sphere entirely. There are, of course, rumors that she could get some kind of federal appointment, given her close relationship to President Obama. She’d probably like some time to recover from this rough ‘n’ tumble non-campaign. But we know we’ll hear more from her again soon!