Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
A buzzer-beater away from Madison Square Garden, on the eighth floor of a nondescript office building undergoing some irritating and no-doubt symbolic construction, earnest young men and women slave away at the Hillary Rodham Clinton for U.S. Senate Exploratory Committee.
The offices are small and cramped and unimpressive -- typical New York fare -- and the poor young woman handling the phones this Monday afternoon barely gets a moment to breathe. "Hillary 2000, hold please; Hillary 2000, hold please; Hillary 2000, hold please ..."
Calls come in for "Neera" and "Gabrielle" and "Samara," exactly the kinds of names you'd expect at Hillary 2000. Most, however, are for Clinton's overworked press secretary, Howard Wolfson, who is more or less running the shop -- for now. (New York liberal pols Mandy Grunwald and Harold Ickes, pollster Mark Penn and Hillary's right-hand woman, Maggie Williams are involved, too, but they're all doing their best to remain invisible to date.)
The waiting room is covered with immense color images of Clinton in her familiar off-white or dark blue suits, her brilliant blonde coif -- a flattering cut it only took her a half-century to find -- lending her the celebrity look fans need. It's no wonder she was on the cover of the premier issue of Talk.
Interns (though you'd think the campaign would come up with a new name for them) shuttle in and out. One spends maybe 45 minutes deliberately stapling newspaper-clipping photos of Clinton to a bulletin board.
But images and a new blond 'do aren't going to be enough for Hillary to prevail in this campaign. It's going to be a relentless, grueling war, leading Republicans to already whisper that, at the end of the day, Hillary might not even run. Polls right now have Hillary and Rudy still relatively close, but, as any seasoned pol will tell you, it ain't the poll numbers that matter -- it's their direction.
With that in mind, the Battery may be down, but it's nothing compared to Hillary's numbers. According to Marist Institute polls, Hillary was beating Rudy 52 percent to 42 percent in January, but since then, their arrows have headed along different trajectories. Support for Hillary has nose-dived all the way down to 40 while Rudy's numbers have shot up to 49. That's a net 19-point gain for Rudy in nine months.
"If the election were held tomorrow, Rudy would win," says Koch, a former Rudy fan who now supports Hillary. "With the passage of time, voters will distinguish between the two in terms of their ability to work in the Senate and get things done for the state of New York. People will ultimately conclude that a Democratic philosophy will be better for New York, and that as a messenger for that philosophy Hillary is a better fit for New York."
Among plenty of Hillary surrogates, like Koch, you can already hear a strategy to downplay their woman versus the other side's man, in favor of talking parties instead.
In addition to our booming economy, Hillary has a few other numbers working for her: registered Democrats vastly outnumber Republicans statewide -- 4,999,541 to 3,078,574, as of April 1.
Rudy might be a liberal Republican -- he once worked for RFK, and voted for McGovern in '72, plus he leans left on abortion, gay rights, and gun control. But he came out in favor of the GOP's tax-cut plans, with more "team-player" moves sure to follow. Democrats therefore plan on tying Rudy to Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., who is widely perceived throughout the Empire State as being anti-New York and pro-South.
Hillary seems to embrace the partisan approach."The Republican Party [tax-cut] bill ... would be in effect a statement that would ask us to cut and run on our obligations to older Americans," she said at a Sept. 14 appearance in Great Neck, Long Island, in front of an audience of -- you guessed it -- older Americans. "It would break our faith with the seniors in New York, and I would fight it, if I were in the Congress now."
The last Senate fight in these parts was a year ago, between the smarty-pants Democrat, Rep. Chuck Schumer of Brooklyn, and the shameless Republican, then-Sen. Alphonse D'Amato. The main battleground then is the same one now:
The suburbs.
Like Chappaqua, for instance, where mishpocheh Clinton just bought a $1.7 million, 11-room Dutch colonial, using a fishy loan from a supporter.
There's the rest of Westchester County, and Long Island -- both Nassau and Suffolk -- plus all the women (and as many as possible of the Reagan Democrats) in Buffalo, Erie County, Rochester, Albany and Syracuse.
Schumer tailored his message to these folks by talking about upstate jobs, education and health care. For the women in the suburbs he threw in gun control and abortion rights. He ran a textbook campaign that also appealed to the state's exhaustion with D'Amato, who had dragged the state through various ethics debacles and a racist joke or two, and by being just generally annoying.
Eighteen years was enough. D'Amato fatigue had set in.
But there's another kind of fatigue at work this time around, and it doesn't cut so well for the Democrats.
They know it, too. You can see it in the fact that just last week, Hillary's brothers, Anthony and Hugh Rodham, backed out of an $118 million scheme to grow and import hazelnuts in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. As first disclosed by the Washington Post, not long ago les freres Rodham appeared at a press conference with Aslan Abashidze, a political leader with ties to an alleged mobster. After a Post op-ed hammered the Rodhams for the deal, the brothers announced they were backing out of it, expressing reluctance "to do any harm to the first lady or the administration."
One senses that the brothers Rodham didn't have much say in the matter. It doesn't much seem to matter if the Rodhams were up to no good.
After all, you can't buy a blintz in the former Soviet Union without bumping into someone with ties to the mob.
As the Clintons have maybe -- finally -- learned, it ain't the impropriety, it's the appearance, that matters.
Still, it doesn't even have to be impropriety to make news.
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