New York State Of Mine

By Eric Pooley/Oneonta

On the first day of the rest of her life--last Wednesday, when she flew from Washington to upstate New York to begin the obligatory "exploratory" phase of her campaign for the U.S. Senate--Hillary Rodham Clinton ordered her motorcade to stop just outside the Binghamton airport. She hopped out of her van and, as a look of uh-oh, here-we-go flickered across the face of one of her Secret Service agents, plunged into a crowd of 50 well-wishers--the first spontaneous mosh-pit moment of Clinton's strange and improbable proto-campaign. She hugged children, signed autographs, posed for snapshots, and made deep and significant eye contact with as many peepers as possible. (There could be no doubt who had taught her the mystical arts of the rope line.) When 15-year-old Stephanie Stein handed her a photograph, Clinton gazed at it for a few long, respectful moments, and one got the feeling that the photo contained the apotheosis of youthful achievement. Then Hillary locked eyes with the girl and asked, "You've been a cheerleader for how long now?" "Four years," Stephanie said proudly. In the picture, she was going through her pom-pom paces for Binghamton High. "Four years," Hillary marveled. "Wow."

Looking for the sunny, specious hucksterism of the campaign trail? Step right up--Hillary will give it to you. This year's model is advertised as new and improved--less formidable and more fun, tenderized by a year of public humiliation, performing the silly rituals that campaigns are made of (hefting Hank Aaron's bat at the Baseball Hall of Fame, tucking into barbecue at a local rib joint) and loving them. Though one can't help suspecting that she sometimes feels she's slumming, she never lets it show. No doubt she is genuinely enjoying this moment of stepping out on her own, serving her ambition after 25 years of serving Bill's. (She has been thinking about doing this since at least 1990, when, according to former Clinton strategist Dick Morris, she considered running for Arkansas Governor if Bill decided not to stand for re-election.) The simple pleasure she takes in campaigning--probing genuinely serious policy issues; meeting people who regard her with thunderstruck awe, as if she were Joan of Arc in a minivan--may seem banal, but it's crucial to the whole venture. If it weren't fun, she'd pull the plug, but right now that's about as likely as her switching to the G.O.P. She told a group of reporters last Thursday, "It is a different feeling to be the person who is in the spotlight voluntarily and speaking on my own behalf... You know, yesterday was the first time I had ever done it... I loved what I did." Says an adviser: "I don't think there's any way she's going to tire of this."

But will New York tire of her? Sixteen months before the election, Clinton is a vessel for the hopes, dreams and sympathies of her supporters (typical refrain: "I admire you so much as a person") and for the fears and hatreds of her many detractors (HILLARY GO HOME signs sprouted wherever she went last week). There are legions on both sides, and neither can quite believe she is actually going to bring her soap opera to their state. But bring it she will. Where a lesser person might be having a post-traumatic breakdown right about now, Hillary is having a campaign--and, it would seem, the time of her life. Is this politics, psychotherapy, or a little of both? Whatever the answer, the campaign for Senate is filling a large need. It would take a cataclysm to keep her out of this race.

After all those years spent learning from the master, it's no surprise that her candidate's persona last week was profoundly Clintonian--by turns folksy and falsely humble, dazzlingly smart and suddenly peremptory, as when she ignored or brushed aside inconvenient questions about the Lewinsky scandal (the affair that helped make this run possible, after all, by boosting sympathy and softening her image). All week long she tried her best to stick to a script that called on her to listen and learn, seeming to absorb knowledge and wisdom from local experts and average folks in Oneonta, Cooperstown, Utica, Rome and Syracuse. The self-effacing, studious pose is supposed to buy time and get people accustomed to a startling sight: the first First Lady ever to run for office, doing so while her husband still occupies his. But this phase of her campaign, which will involve two- or three-day jaunts around New York most weeks through the summer and fall, is designed to accomplish an array of other objectives too.

First, her "listening sessions"--90-minute round-table discussions on health care, education reform and the like--are meant to bore the daylights out of the press corps, driving them on to other stories, dousing the flames of hype, reducing the size of her pack so she can campaign in a quasi-normal fashion. Some 300 media types covered her kickoff endorsement at Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's Delaware County farm last Wednesday, and the education event that afternoon began a war of attrition. Says an adviser: "It was fun to watch the TV cameras shut down and leave the room one by one." On Thursday the media horde had dwindled to 200; by Friday it was down to 75.

The Never Ending Tour's second strategic purpose is to have Clinton spend so much time in New York that she becomes part of the scenery. She's hoping this will help neutralize what she called "a very fair question," the charge that she is a carpetbagger with no ties to the state and no business running there. (She wants her novelty to wear off but not her celebrity.)

Third, by appearing modest and thirsty for the wisdom of New Yorkers--taking notes, asking questions--she hopes to erase, as much as possible, the memory of the arrogant know-it-all of 1994 who designed a 1,364-page health-care reform plan in secret sessions. At a medical center in Cooperstown, Clinton voiced her impatience with incremental health-care reform, "the school of smaller steps" she and her husband have been forced to rely on ever since; the patient's bill of rights, though she supports it, is a mere "diversion" from the real problems: greedy drug companies, miserly managed-care combines, 43 million uninsured Americans. But at the same forum she had the nerve to say that when she approaches health issues, "I'm only a patient. I'm just a lay person."

That's hokum, of course--the bit of flimflam at the core of her listening tour. Hillary knew more about health care and education than most of the panelists she was listening to last week. She displayed an extraordinary command of policy detail, a steely anger on behalf of those getting screwed by the health and education systems, a fine ear for the telling local anecdote (such as the Ithaca car-crash victim denied insurance coverage after she failed to get preapproval for her emergency helicopter evacuation because she was unconscious at the time). But she was the Woman Who Knew Too Much. When a panelist at the education forum in Oneonta talked about an early-elementary remediation program called Reading Recovery, Hillary couldn't contain herself. "I know something about this program because I've followed it and I've supported it for, I guess, more than 10 or 12 years," she began, "ever since I learned about it being pioneered in New Zealand." It was classic Hillary. Time and again she would ask some nuanced question that her panelists were unable to answer--and then she would answer it herself:

Hillary: Is the Medicaid reimbursement formula now significantly different from most managed-care reimbursement rates?

Expert: Uh, I don't know.

Hillary: Well, what I'm being told is, in some parts of the country the managed-care rate is not much better if at all better than the Medicaid rate, but there still is resistance toward [accepting] Medicaid patients.

Expert: [stunned silence]

In politics, it's not smart to seem too smart. Bill Clinton uses his intellect to dazzle audiences, but he does it in an inclusive way. He articulates things people know but can't quite express. Hillary sometimes can't help intimidating them. At a senior citizens' center in Utica, a teacher told her that the school district's resources for disabled students are spread too thin because of a federal decree that disabled students be mainstreamed, not put in special schools. Hillary corrected her. They can be mainstreamed, she said, but still concentrated in specific schools, "so you have a whole row of wheelchairs, not just one or two." The teacher hung her head. "I apologize; we do that," she said. Bill would have salved her ego. Hillary asked for another question, but for a long, silent moment, there weren't any. Her listeners didn't want to cross swords with her, and who could blame them? But when the session was over, they all came up for autographs.

The listening events also let Clinton demonstrate what she has been learning about the state's history and economy, its people and problems. Once or twice on each day of her tour, she showed off her prize stat the way a dog parades a bone: "If upstate New York were a separate state," she said, "it would rank 49th in job creation and economic development." And that's more than a stat--it's an indication of how she'll run against her probable opponent, New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

In upstate New York, it's still the economy, stupid. Since 1960 the city of Utica, for example, has lost half its population--down to 64,000 from 125,000--and much of the region has scarcely benefited from the boom of the 1990s, suggesting that the same lunch-pail issues that delivered New York to Bill in 1992 could help deliver it to Hillary in 2000. Her signature concerns--economic fairness and child welfare, education reform and affordable health care--won't carry the largely Republican upstate against Giuliani, but they could keep it close enough for her to win, since she's likely to beat him handily in his own (Democratic) hometown. The race's great unknown is who would take the New York City suburbs, where both are very popular.

Before she starts dealing with all that, however, Hillary has to define herself as a candidate distinct from her husband. At first, her advisers were worried that doing so would lead to a spate of "rift" articles of the kind that have been chronicling tensions between Al Gore and the President. But Hillary and her team believe it is most important to ever-so-gingerly demonstrate that she is not his policy clone. (When she considered running for Governor of Arkansas in 1990, Morris has said, his polling indicated that voters would see her as a "stand-in" for Bill. She won't let that happen this time.) And so last week Hillary began opening up about policy agreements and disagreements--programs she had fought for behind the scenes at the White House, such as the child health-insurance plan called CHIP ("I worked very hard to make sure we got it done") and a proposed tax credit to help pay for long-term care ("a proposal that the President and I unveiled together earlier this year"). She tried to inoculate herself against charges of being too liberal by saying she urged Clinton to sign the welfare-reform bill of 1996 ("The system was so broken...we had to clear the decks"). And she stepped away from him on several New York issues--beginning the move from First Lady to candidate in a place where the politics are famously loud and cartoonish.

The most glaring example was a letter she sent to the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, which represents nearly 1,000 Jewish synagogues around the U.S. In it she wrote that she considers Jerusalem "the eternal and indivisible capital of Israel" and wants to see the U.S. embassy moved there from Tel Aviv. Neither position reflects Administration policy, but both reflect New York political reality. Hillary's advisers were feeling swell about the letter, because for the first time, as one says, "she made a judgment that the dictates of New York politics were going to structure what she did. She crossed a Rubicon." In other words, she had the good sense to notch her first abject pander to a New York interest group. (She then wasted no time notching her second, coming out in favor of price supports for New York dairy farmers.) Pop the corks.

With her Jerusalem letter, Hillary was working hard to undo some of the damage she did among Jews in May 1998, when she made the mistake of saying what most Americans think--that the Palestinians should have a state of their own. (Her latest position doesn't preclude statehood, it seems, so long as the new state's capital isn't Jerusalem.)

The other policy friction between Bill and Hillary involves the effect that $5 billion in Administration-proposed Medicare cuts would have on New York teaching hospitals in the next five years. She talks frequently these days about getting New York "its fair share," and here's an issue where she has a chance to do so. Moynihan is sponsoring legislation to restore the cuts; Senator Chuck Schumer and Dennis Rivera, New York's hospital workers' union chief and a key Hillary supporter, recently arranged a White House meeting to discuss them. Hillary attended and voiced support for New York's cause, but has since declined to express anything more than "concern" over the issue.

Hillary is not yet ready to use her juice to alter Administration policy, and perhaps she shouldn't be. She is, after all, only an undeclared candidate. All the same, Rivera was said to be "livid" (New York power brokers are always getting "livid"--that's part of the fun), even though they must know she needs time before she can break with the President on an issue like Medicare. "She's married to the guy--she can't just flip a switch and become a noisy fighter for New York," says an adviser. "It's got to be gradual, appropriate and reasonable." But New York, as Hillary well knows, has never been a reasonable place. It has a way of making you shout, even when all you want to do is listen.