Democrats were quick to decry Gov. Charlie Crist’s appointment of former top aide George LeMieux to fill a U.S. Senate vacancy as cronyism. But this The New York Times politics blog post argues that Crist appointing LeMieux as a placeholder while he runs for the seat in 2010 isn’t much different from the Kennedy family arranging for Benjamin A. Smith II to keep John F. Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat warm until Ted Kennedy was old enough to run for it in 1962.

A more recent parallel, writer Peter Baker notes, is this year’s appointment of Vice President Joe Biden’s former Senate chief of staff, Ted Kaufman, to hold Biden’s Delaware Senate while the VP’s son, Beau Biden, is expected to run for it next year.