Just One Day At A Time

By DOUGLAS WALLER

At the moment last Tuesday when Bill Clinton emerged from the Harlem office building where he wants to rent space and waded into the adoring crowd--his first brilliant p.r. move as a former President--Hillary Clinton was having a typical experience in her new life as a Senator. She was sitting in a sleepy Senate Budget Committee hearing, listening to four economists drone on about George W. Bush's tax-cut plan. And as Bill addressed his well-wishers--"I feel wonderful about it!" he crowed--Hillary finally got her chance to grill the witnesses. "Just give me a yes or no answer," she demanded. "Would you still favor this tax cut" if it ate up money for other vital programs?

Bill and Hillary Clinton have launched their separate lives, both of them shadowed by the recent crop of scandal. He is in New York City, struggling to rise above his mistakes; she's in Washington, trying just as hard to burrow into her work and begin her future. What was supposed to be the triumphant start of a new career has turned into something altogether less appealing. To get a sense of how she's coping, TIME spent last Tuesday with Clinton as she went about her Senate business. She denies that the furor over pardons and gifts and pricey office suites has thrown her off balance--"I haven't felt distracted from my job," she insists--but friends and Senate colleagues tell a different story. "You can see it on her face," says a Democratic Senator. "This has been very difficult for her."

She tries not to let it show. Clinton is beaming Tuesday morning as she walks briskly through the tunnel connecting the Capitol to the Dirksen Senate Office Building. She has just given her first speech on the Senate floor, a call for more affordable health care (and a typically proud move, given her history on the subject). No matter that only a couple of other Senators drifted in to hear it; the New York press pack that surrounds her afterward wants to talk about the speech, not the scandal. That's a good way to start the day.

Clinton is now in a hurry to get to a health-subcommittee hearing, but 10 yds. from the SENATORS ONLY elevator she meets her first intercept of the day--a young woman from Watertown, N.Y., who rushes up to shake her hand. "Hi, dear, how are you!" Clinton gushes. "I was just in Watertown yesterday." Next comes a New York City stockbroker skeptical of the Bush tax cut, then a delegation from Kyrgyzstan, then an environmental lobbyist. It happens whenever she walks about Capitol Hill--scandal or no, Hillary remains a celebrity. Most Senators have aides brief them during walks to hearings; Clinton has given that up for the most part and budgeted more time for trips because of the constant interruptions. ("We're learning all the rules of the Senate," she explains, "and then those that apply to me.") One overeager fan even jumped the tracks for the underground congressional trolley to get a chance to meet her. That must be some comfort when Hillary sees her statewide approval numbers sliding down to 38%.

This time Clinton poses for photos and collects a Kyrgyzstani wooden doll from the delegation and business cards from the New Yorkers. In the elevator she hands the cards to an aide. "Be sure they go into our central data bank," she orders. Particularly the broker. "I'm looking for New Yorkers who understand how damaging a large tax cut would be."

Other Senators can skip hearings or doze through them; Clinton must attend regularly and appear attentive, because the press notices her absences and the cameras always turn her way. She still fumes about the recent Washington Post gossip item that included an unflattering photo of her at a hearing where she'd shown up with no makeup and hair, as the item said, hanging "like rain-battered weeds." Inevitably, the item fueled tabloid speculation about her health. "Hello?" Clinton gripes. "I mean, really. No woman I know looks exactly the same every single day!"

At 2:30 p.m. Clinton is lingering at the weekly Democratic Caucus lunch in the Capitol's L.B.J. Room. (She also religiously attends closed-door meetings for Senators and shows up "having done her homework," says Democratic Senator Kent Conrad, "which is a good way to make a positive impression.") While minority leader Tom Daschle outlines the floor schedule for the rest of the week, Clinton munches on tuna salad and stuffed cabbage. Every Tuesday the dining room offers what the Senators call the "church potluck" dish. Clinton says it reminds her of church dinners when she was a girl.

As she leaves the room, her aides are pleased to see a gaggle of journalists waiting outside the L.B.J. Room to catch Senators as they come out: no New York reporters in the crowd to pummel her with pardon or gift questions. The New York pack must be satisfied with her maiden floor speech as the Hillary story for the next day's papers.

By 5 p.m. Clinton is finally back at her temporary office in the basement of the Dirksen Building. Next month she'll move to her permanent quarters, Senator Pat Moynihan's old suite. For now, her 27 staff members and volunteers are crammed elbow to elbow in a small, windowless space stuffed with boxes and computers stacked on desks. The computers keep crashing because the circuits are overloaded.

Clinton slumps into a chair in her tiny office off the main room, pulls off her earrings and begins attacking a stack of memos, some of them on the bill she wants to introduce next month to revive upstate New York's ailing economy. There were more meetings after the caucus lunch, including an important one with California Senator Dianne Feinstein, who offered advice on setting up a legislative office that can cope with the demands of a large state. Clinton is an obsessive organizer, but so far she's surrounded by administrative chaos. She's still putting together a computer system to handle the thousands of letters that are pouring in from constituents each week. The weekend before, she hosted a "mail jamboree," inviting interns from other offices to help whittle down the backlog.

Home is just as hectic. Repair vans have been lining up each day at her $2.85 million house off Embassy Row. Clinton moved in last Wednesday; she had been staying at Vernon Jordan's home during renovations. She may intend the Washington house to be a fund-raising salon, but friends insist she's focused for now only on making it livable for her mother Dorothy, who will be staying with her, for Chelsea's visits, and for her husband when he comes with his security detail.

Talking to her, you get the sense that Clinton's frenetic schedule provides a kind of refuge from all those exit scandals. The furor over their $190,000 in going-away gifts is fading; Marc Rich wasn't her fault; but questions linger about whether she had a hand in the pardoning of four New York Hasidic Jews shortly after their community voted for her en bloc. "I had nothing to do with" any of the pardons, she insists. As her fellow Democratic Senators distance themselves from her husband as fast as they can, "there's a certain degree of empathy for Hillary," says a top aide to another Senator. Maybe that will be enough to get her through the most difficult weeks any freshman could imagine.