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Caroline Kennedy, who cryptically ended her bid to serve out Hillary Clinton’s Senate term last week, was born in New York the same day I was: Nov. 27, 1957 (very good, schmendrick, we’re 51). I used to think the similarities ended there.

Her father, a martyred president, wrote “Profiles in Courage.” My father, a Madison Avenue ad man, lost the Levolor blinds account when he misspelled the name.

Remember? “Behind the Levolor name...”

Caroline’s mother, a Bouvier, was a Smith College-educated debutante who skillfully redecorated the White House. My mother, a Barbieri, went to secretarial school and used to paint our picture window every Christmas with the Madonna and child.

Caroline and brother John-John summered at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port with their pony, Macaroni. My brother Patrick and I summered at Sunken Meadow on Long Island with our beagle, Grover, whom our parents ended up giving away and not telling us for three days.

Am I implying that we were bourgeois Levittown losers? No. Am I jealous? Uh-uh. I’m just saying, toothy half-Irish dental work notwithstanding, countless cousins born in the Age of the Rhythm Method (directly preceding the Age of Aquarius) aside, we had little in common with the Kennedys.

No one did, this side of the Atlantic. Or the other side, for that matter.

Not Diana, or the somewhat more accessible Sarah Ferguson. Not Bono. Not the Beatles, though we’re getting warm. Not even — am I allowed to say this? — Barack and Michelle.

After all, what could equal the tragic candle power of, first, a dual assassination in 1963 and ’68 of JFK and his brother RFK, then the awful spectacle of Ted’s failings played out only the next year, then the painful saga of presidential widow Jackie trying to save her sanity, finally getting the “h” out of this nutty country.

How nutty? First we renounce the King of England and dump all his tea in the harbor. Then, we spend the next 200 years obsessed with royalty and people like Grace Kelly, the movie starlet “princess of Philadelphia,” and that plainer Pennsylvanian, castle-wrecker Wallis Simpson.

But the Kennedys gave paparazzi-crazed Americans our own Shakespearean epic. Dying kings. Tragic queens. And heirs to endlessly hound. My favorite tabloid headline from the early ’70s, cooked up by the National Enquirer, or was it The Star?

“JOHN-JOHN UNDERGOES SEX CHANGE! Shocking details inside!”

Buried inside, of course, the story quoted mother Jackie innocently remarking to a friend that her adolescent son’s voice was “changing.”

The thing I remember hearing about Caroline was — you didn’t. She was the other Kennedy. Not the little boy in short pants saluting JFK’s funeral parade. Not the hunky, charismatic editor of George magazine every woman had her eye on — as well as every political pundit in Washington. All the intriguing “what ifs” to be cut short by his fatal 1999 plane crash.

So when the “other” Kennedy suddenly dared dream of carrying on the family business as the sun sets on the last Kennedy brother and rises on a “new Camelot” that Caroline herself endorsed and campaigned for, it all happened too fast.

One day she’s in the VIP section at the inauguration, notes this week’s New Yorker, the next day she’s telling the New York governor to appoint someone else to what was once-upon-a-time her uncle Bobby’s seat, before it was held by Clinton, President Obama’s Secretary of State.

All that history, a whole new set of “what ifs,” dashed in a day, and so far even the supermarket rags haven’t clawed loose what is behind the vague “personal reasons” Kennedy gave for withdrawing her name.

In the monthlong exploratory run-up, however, I found out I was wrong about the only other person I know of who was born on the day before Thanksgiving 1957 in New York. We do have other things in common.

She was a copy girl at the Daily News. (Not Greensboro, New York.) She put in for overtime, and no doubt earned it, writes The Times’ Sam Roberts, by having to drive Jimmy Breslin around. She got an education, had a career, got married, raised her children, and enjoyed putting TV announcers in their place, particularly CNN’s self-proclaimed “best political team on television.”

So after all these years, I’m doing it too. I’m going all goo-goo-eyed over a Kennedy with the rest of the TV twinkies who get anywhere close to her. Or I’m just feeling empathy for a 51-year-old woman born the same day as me (though I’m pretty sure Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, unlike Lorraine Sr., wasn’t served lime Jell-O in a semi-private room at Huntington Hospital.)

In any case, why don’t we just let Caroline Kennedy alone tonight to take a hot bath and put on some much-needed moisturizer? She’ll be there for us to hound tomorrow.

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com