A Yuppie Courts the Unions

IT’S FIVE MINUTES before Hillary Clinton is due to arrive to address a rally in the 10th-floor penthouse of the New York District Council of Carpenters. An old union activist, jostled among the crowd of undergraduate campaign volunteers, mutters, “You know, this is not the kind of union hall where I saw ‘Red Mike’ Quill take the Transport Union out on strike.”

No, it certainly is not. This part of lower Manhattan — at the corner of Hudson and Houston — used to say “light manufacturing”; now it says “espresso.” Penguin Books is a block away; Saatchi & Saatchi is across the street; Internet advertisements loom out of the parking lot in front of the building. And even this union “hall” — with its beige carpets and its picture windows, its formica dais surrounded by cameras and the bombsniffing dogs the Secret Service brings everywhere Hillary goes — bears less resemblance to a West Village local than to the library of the Romance Languages department at some upstate SUNY.

This was the event where Hillary turned on a dime and realized she was no longer running against Rudy Giuliani. There are a lot of trade-offs to having Long Island congressman Rick Lazio as an opponent instead of the New York mayor. Lazio brings a lot of pluses. He’ll run stronger upstate than Giuliani, since he brings none of the alien urban sensibility a New York City mayor does. Lazio is not a one-man get-out-the-vote effort in minority neighborhoods. Giuliani was, particularly after he mishandled the police shooting of Patrick Dorismond and saw his approval ratings plummet to an astonishing 1 percent among blacks, according to a New York Times poll. Right now Lazio looks like the stronger candidate. Or as a longtime New York Democratic strategist put it with considerably more precision: “He’s weaker than Rudy was in January but stronger than he was in May.”

But Lazio brings a couple of disadvantages, too. Either of the other two Republicans bruited to succeed Giuliani — Buffalo’s Jack Quinn and Long Island’s Pete King — would have been stronger among unions. Lazio has created some bad blood. “I kind of admire the guy,” a scornful Jack Kittle, political director of the painters’ union, says of Lazio. “He’s the only politician I know who can come into your local, make a lot of promises, and break them the next day.” Kittle’s union is about evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, but the only thing that’s kept them from endorsing Hillary is that they haven’t yet been able to set a date to have her over for Roman sandwiches at the union hall in Long Island City. The building trades unions have endorsed her (some more enthusiastically than others — the plumbers are lukewarm). So has the State Federation of New York (the umbrella group that embraces all of New York’s AFL-CIO unions). A measure of the solidity of Hillary’s support among unions is that not one of them put an iota of pressure on her when permanent normal trade relations with China came before the Congress.

Labor plays a special role for Hillary, particularly since Giuliani can no longer be used as a scarecrow to rally blacks. Unions are the engine of minority turnout in New York. And that’s what makes the Potemkin village aspect to the unionism at the Carpenters’ hall so striking. A half-dozen service employees of John Sweeney’s old union, the left-wing SEIU, which has already endorsed Hillary, were there in their purple T-shirts. Three department-store workers from the RWDSU were wearing their navyblue windbreakers indoors. The carpenters’ executive director introduced the candidate, and a rank-and-file member paid tribute to the way Hillary had “listened and loined” on her tour through all 62 counties of New York.

Other than that, this was a union event only in name. The celebrities here were not the heavy hitters of the labor movement but New York City politicos, most of them from the Democrats’ feminist wing, like state chairman Judith Hope and city councilwoman Kathryn Freed. The campaign volunteers handing out the made-to-look-homemade signs (New York Loves Hillary! Hillary for New York! Pro-Choice/Pro-New York/Pro-Hillary) were all rich-looking kids of college age, the boys with goatees and earrings and Brecht glasses, the (far, far more numerous) girls with bare midriffs, all of them rocking to the new Sting song, “Brand New Day,” which is rapidly becoming a campaign anthem.

Nor did it sound like a union event. After a perfunctory mention of the National Labor Relations Act, labor came up almost not at all. With labor in her back pocket, Hillary seems to be focusing on her most alarming problem constituency: Jewish women, among whom Giuliani was running either even or ahead. This spells catastrophe. A Democrat trailing among New York Jews is like a Republican trailing among Indiana gun owners. Hillary has taken comfort in very early polls that show her 16 points ahead of Lazio among Jews. And she’s now seeking to lock up that advantage through constant appeals to Jewish women on the one issue on which polls show them to be off the charts: abortion rights.

Since Lazio has always been pro-choice, except on partial-birth abortion (which Hillary doesn’t mention, since it’s a losing issue for any candidate who backs it), finding votes that show Lazio as a menace to abortion has taken some ingenuity. She focuses on funding issues, construing Hyde Amendment votes on government-funded abortions as votes on abortion itself. Thus, she is able to cast Lazio as one who “would deny choice to women serving in the military.”

The Hillary campaign’s premise — that Giuliani had some magical appeal to Jews that Lazio lacks — is wrong. It is Hillary’s unconcealable indifference to the fate of Israel that’s wrecking her with that constituency. It’s not just her public embrace of Suha Arafat; it’s her private and sneaky courtship of Israel’s enemies. The New York-based Jewish weekly the Forward noted recently that Hillary had attended fund-raisers held (at her campaign’s request) by Arafat crony Hani Masri and Pakistani real estate mogul Rafat Mahmood, both of whom have long records of opening their campaign spigots primarily to anti-Zionists.

With Lazio now just two points behind her, according to one poll, Hillary has decided to run a yuppie campaign whose twin pillars are television and polarization. Hillary is campaigning in New York as if it were California, as if only television mattered, and as if this were a battle between a bourgeois moderate and a crowd of kooks. Television is a good medium for Hillary because she doesn’t wear well over long exposure or up-close. She’s annoyingly immodest on the stump. She shouts over applause, as if it’s an interruption. When she greets supporters her eyes take on a kind of goggly, maniacal gregariousness that leaves her looking like Snow White’s stepmother.

Television also helps Hillary in two other ways: First, it fosters a gravitas gap between herself and Lazio. The seat the two are vying to fill, after all, is that of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, for decades the Senate’s leading intellectual. Hillary’s supporters reckon New Yorkers would rather replace him with a celebrity than with a boyish-looking Long Islander with a fat lip. Television also heightens national — i.e. ideological — issues over local, commonsensical, bread-and-butter ones. That polarizes the race, and polarization is a big part of the Clinton strategy. Hillary desperately wants the base-to-base contest she had until Rudy Giuliani left the race. Heating up partisanship is good politics for a New York Democrat, of course, but Hillary hasn’t yet figured out how to do it. She’s trying new options. She has dropped from her oratory the heretofore constant references to Lazio as a tool of Newt Gingrich. The one thing she mustn’t do is play along with Lazio’s strategy to cast this as a race between two middle-of-the-roaders, one likable, one not. Hence these carefully scripted attacks along ideological fault lines.

Can a California strategy work in New York? Who knows? Hillary remains desperately worried about the accusations that she is a carpetbagging interloper, and tries to defuse them at every turn. “When my opponent tells you where he’s from,” she says, “I’ll tell you what I’m for.” On the one hand, this canned, televised, counterfeit-poster style of presentation only feeds the perception of carpetbagging. It’s not that she’s not from New York — it’s that she’s not from anywhere. Phony, inauthentic, and scripted are the words one hears from Democrats who don’t back her as much as they’ve backed their party’s candidates in previous years.

On the other hand, New York is changing as rapidly as the rest of the country — bobofying, for the most part, but also witnessing a widening of its gap between rich and poor, which was already the nation’s most yawning. A lot of new ideas are going to work in this election, and a lot of old reliable ones are going to fail. Hillary’s upstate strategy, for instance — treating the Empire State as if it were Arkansas, using a cadre of teachers and government social workers to mobilize the under-employed and the underinsured — has been working beyond her wildest dreams.

Even down here on Hudson Street, all sorts of new people are moving in. All sorts of them. As we filed out after the rally, a journalist pointed out the window to a tall copper-roofed warehouse a few blocks away on Christopher Street. “Hey, you know who lives in one of the apartments in there?” he said.

“No, who?”

“Monica Lewinsky!”

Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.