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Politics : Hillary Rodham Clinton, Senator from New York? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: chalu2 who wrote (200)	7/9/1999 8:20:00 AM
From: Zoltan!	Respond to of 3389

July 9, 1999 The Icon Lady What befits an icon most? Nowadays it's the prospect of draping oneself in high political office. More than 300 reporters showed up to welcome First Lady Hillary Clinton to the politics of New York State, as she began her "listening tour" to ponder a possible Senate candidacy. We would like to welcome her as well. We recall during the first-term debate over her health-care initiative how much energy went into arguing over whether she was the "functional equivalent" of a government employee and therefore beyond several federal laws. It surely will be healthier all around to have Hillary Clinton finally functioning as an officially certified professional politician. The early reviews of her out-of-town tryout with Pat Moynihan were good, marveling at how deftly she handled the day of photo shoots and batting-practice questions from reporters. That said, the fundamentals of this candidacy continue to be cause for wonder. For starters, there is the Iron Law of Icons in politics. It holds that once celebrity figures turn into candidates, they slowly sink to earth. If a celebrity candidate starts off with 80% approval, as a Dwight Eisenhower or John Glenn did, they can survive their displacement from the pedestal. But Mrs. Clinton's celebrity is not in the same pure league as, say, Joe DiMaggio. She begins this quest with mediocre poll numbers (the average of all current surveys put her in the low 40s). "The best day that former Miss America Bess Meyerson and Geraldine Ferraro had in running for New York Senator was the day they announced," says Brian Lunde, a former executive director of the Democratic National Committee. "It was largely downhill from there." There is the matter of the state's ambivalent, touchy Democratic Party, nowhere more so than in New York City. The island's fractious Democrats are like something out of medieval Italy. This is the place, after all, that spawned both Dick Morris and Harold Ickes. Thus, the most vicious media attack on Hillary so far appeared on the cover of the Village Voice, seconded most recently by the liberal Newsday's hyperliberal columnist Jimmy Breslin. Few New York politicos, though, are willing to express their concerns publicly. Rep. Nita Lowey, her own Senate aspirations trashed and left by the side of the road, now sounds like Susan McDougal. Most New Yorkers look forward to the campaign spectacle of pols from the same party trashing each other. To ensure that the state's voluble Democrats don't bad-mouth her, Mrs. Clinton has transposed several New York enforcers to this campaign from the main Clinton operation. They include Harold Ickes, Terry McAuliffe and Susan Thomases. It's telling that this newcomer to New York politics is calling on the same crowd that was instrumental in the sordid 1996 campaign fund-raising scandal. New York Democratic consultant Hank Sheinkopf, a senior strategist in the 1996 Clinton campaign, puts her odds of winning at no better than 50-50. This makes the candidacy enormously stressful for New York's already beleaguered Democrats. They've recently been putting forward such hapless candidates as Ruth Messinger and Peter Vallone, but when they lose, New York's resilient liberals manage to plod forward with their diehard base reforming into a globulous whole. But if the icon loses, she could take the creaking New York Democratic idea down with her. Hillary's money is a more immediate Democratic concern. For six years, the Clintons have been a fund-raising black hole, siphoning into themselves every dollar in the Democratic financial universe. They've made relentless trips to New York City to pick up their percentage of rich Democrats' stock-market gains. Mrs. Clinton's outsized candidacy, most agree, could raise $20 million to $25 million, reducing the flow of funds to more needful Democratic Senate candidates or the Gore campaign. The late Jim McDougal once described the Clintons as "tornadoes that move through people's lives." New York Democrats may learn the feeling. If she loses, don't expect her to hang around Westchester County to help restore the wreckage. And of course there is the legacy of the Clinton scandals and unsolved mysteries. So far, Mrs. Clinton has dismissed questions about all this by saying, "We've moved beyond all of that." Maybe that's what they do in Little Rock, but this is New York, whose political culture never moves "beyond all of that." "As a candidate you have to answer every question," New York Senator Charles Schumer said this week. "Every one." The Breslin column this week was an attack on her "smug deviousness and untruthfulness." The Voice's comprehensive cover story was on the "Hillary Clinton Sleaze Factor." As the truly iconic New York oracle Yogi Berra once said, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it." Mrs. Clinton isn't at the fork yet. She has only formed an "exploratory committee." For all the hoopla, the filing deadline for the Senate seat isn't until next summer. We wouldn't be surprised if around Christmas she suddenly pulled out, citing personal reasons. The millions raised by her exploratory committee would be available for other political purposes. More than a few New York Democrats would breathe a great sigh of relief. And who knows, with any luck they might be able to get Alec Baldwin to run against Rudy. interactive.wsj.com