New York
WE’RE STILL nine months away from the day when voters get to cast even a primary vote in the contest to fill Pat Moynihan’s Senate seat. Neither of the two expected candidates has formally announced. But already the race has garnered more headlines, television time, and gossip at home and nationwide in this “out year” than 1998’s exciting and important Senate battle (in which Democrat Chuck Schumer defeated two well-known primary challengers and then wiped out three-term Republican Al D’Amato in a landslide) did during the year in which it actually took place.
As things stand, this is going to be the most watched, written-about, talked-about, and closely-analyzed Senate race in the history of this country.
There are obvious reasons for this. The Republican candidate, Rudolph Giuliani, is now in the sixth year of a mind-bogglingly successful mayoralty that has transformed New York City. The mayor is such an iconic figure that he is known by those who love him and hate him by his nickname alone — he’s become the best known Rudy in the United States.
But the real draw is, of course, the unprecedented presence in the race of the first lady of the United States, a candidacy that offers an equally unprecedented combination of attention-grabbing qualities:
* Hillary Clinton is a pop-culture celebrity at a time when Entertainment Tonight has more viewers than the evening news. In the year of the Stunt Candidacy — Warren Beatty, Cybill Shepherd, Donald Trump — Mrs. Clinton’s is the only race in which the Stunt Candidate might actually win.
* The media continue to lavish amazingly patronizing special attention on women candidates. This “Gee, isn’t it great that a woman is running” attitude has become the negative image of Dr. Johnson’s misogynistic crack that “a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.” There’s no longer any reason to be surprised that women run for office, and given the propensity of the press to grant a female candidate an extra moment or two in the spotlight, they probably do it a little better than men these days. Still, the breathless boosterism continues, and it’s an advantage for Mrs. Clinton.
* Last year, she became the most publicly humiliated wife — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, on five cable news networks — the world has ever known. Which makes Mrs. Clinton’s race for Senate the ultimate test of the power and prevalence of the culture of victimization — whether voters will elect someone not because she’s seen as strong, but in large measure because she’s seen as weak.
There’s another, far less obvious reason for the intensity of interest in the Hillary-Rudy race: It may represent the only clear-cut ideological battle we’ll see in the next year in which stark differences between Republicans and Democrats will be aired in a far more open and direct way than in, say, the presidential race.
The presidential candidates in both parties apparently believe it’s in their interest to blur ideological lines. Republicans are speaking sentimentally about Social Security and how many Indian tribes support them, while Al Gore attacks Bill Bradley for considering tax increases. It’s not hard to see where all this goes: In the general election, the Republican will spend half of his time speaking Spanish and talking diversity, while the Democrat goes to church every day and talks about the moral crisis facing the nation. The Republican will be doing his best to seem cheerful and compassionate, the Democrat sober and virtuous. Each party’s choice will work frantically to buff his raw edges.
None of that is going to happen in the New York Senate race. The candidates are already chosen, the battle plans already clear. Hillary Clinton needs a massive minority turnout while trying to appeal to suburban women. Giuliani needs a massive turnout among upstate Republicans even as he reminds New York City voters of all he’s done to make their lives better.
As a result, Mrs. Clinton is running as an unapologetic liberal-leftist. Her core supporters are the state’s teachers’ unions (it was local union head Randi Weingarten who asked Mrs. Clinton the staged question a few weeks ago whether she was running or not) and the immensely powerful hospital workers’ union run by Dennis Rivera. (Hospitals are a colossal business in the state; they employ some 400,000 people and are supported by some $ 2.4 billion in public sector spending.)
Giuliani has shifted to the right this fall. He has taken an uncompromising stand against the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s sponsorship of the offensive “Sensation” exhibit and has instituted strong policies to cope with the problem of homelessness. He wants homeless parents to join welfare-to-work programs or be thrown out of shelters and their kids removed to foster care. And he has ordered police to roust the hard-case homeless into shelters.
The Clinton campaign thinks it can convince voters that Rudy is mean and nasty by calling dramatic attention to his new homeless policies. In the first direct attack on her putative opponent, Mrs. Clinton hauled out the old saw that Joseph and Mary were homeless, too, when they ended up in the stable (untrue; they had a home, but it was in Nazareth, and they had journeyed to Bethlehem to pay taxes).
On December 5 in Union Square Park, a thousand people turned out for a 24-hour protest against the mayor and his homelessness policies. Demonstrations like this will be a key tactic of this Senate campaign: Mrs. Clinton was first convinced Giuliani might be vulnerable to her challenge after the well-coordinated two-week demonstrations early this year in front of police headquarters following the mistaken shooting of the unarmed Amadou Diallo by police. The complaint seemed to be that the mayor didn’t apologize enough for the killing, even though he had apologized almost every day for two months. The clear purpose of the demonstrations was to drive the mayor’s poll numbers down from their stratospheric levels and make a Democratic candidacy against him seem like more than just a joke.
Well, it’s no joke. Indeed, for many people, the outcome of the New York Senate contest is of more pressing concern than any other race in the country. In the past month alone, at least a dozen conservatives have told me that they care more about defeating Mrs. Clinton than they do about the Republicans taking back the White House.
At first glance, this seems insane. What could be more important than the ideological orientation and partisan affiliation of the man in the Oval Office? But consider. These two candidates are both political superstars. Hillary Clinton is one of the most famous people on earth. Rudolph Giuliani is an astonishingly fluent and powerful speaker and a remarkably confident proponent of the views he holds. Although Giuliani has some lingering problems with conservatives in New York, particularly given his support for partial-birth abortion, this race will inevitably make him a hero to the Right — especially when the Clinton machine begins assaulting him.
Whichever one makes it to Washington, the next senator from New York will be a national figure and possible national candidate. New York could well be picking a future president in the year 2000.
Ultimately, though, the importance of the Senate race has to do with the meaning of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. Whether the Democrats choose Gore or Bradley, the party’s nominee next year will be fleeing Bill Clinton. For better or worse, Hillary Clinton will be carrying the mantle of Clintonism into November 2000, and that means the New York election is going to be the true referendum on Bill Clinton’s presidency. For all who consider this presidency a moral calamity, a Giuliani victory on November 3, 2000, would be a particular and most welcome cause for celebration.
Contributing editor John Podhoretz is a columnist for the New York Post. He is writing a book on the 2000 campaign for ReganBooks.
