CURRENT EVENTS UPDATE

By MARGARET CARLSON

At the beginning there were obvious drawbacks. Surely a sitting First Lady wouldn’t abandon the White House for a place in the suburbs of Westchester County to run for office in a state she had only visited. Before impeachment, Hillary was one of the more unpopular First Ladies. She bungled the Administration’s biggest domestic project—health care—after wresting it from Vice President Al Gore’s portfolio. Her fingerprints were everywhere, especially on the scandals (from Whitewater to Travelgate). In every crisis, her reflexive response was to blame others, rail against enemies and stonewall, unless called before a grand jury, at which point she would be overcome by short- and long-term memory loss. It wasn’t until the President found himself under siege that her popularity took off. By the end of impeachment, she realized that people really liked her, so she decided to run.

Clinton made mistakes early on as a campaigner, many of which came from trying to pretend that her birthplace of Chicago was an outer borough of New York City. It bordered on the sacrilegious to don a Yankees cap when she had been a well-known Chicago Cubs fan.

Fortunately, while Clinton was making her worst mistakes, she was running against New York City’s Mayor Rudy Giuliani, whose negatives were as high as hers. When Giuliani finally dropped out to fight prostate cancer, he was replaced by a puppy dog named Rick Lazio, a four-term Congressman from Long Island with a picture-perfect family. He was so frisky at a Memorial Day parade, trying to shake as many hands as possible, that he literally fell on his face. He had to introduce himself to voters with a fat lip.

Lazio wasn’t a bad candidate, but he pitched most of his effort at emphasizing what he wasn’t: a carpetbagger or associated with that infidel in the White House. While he made those two points, Hillary was kissing hundreds of babies upstate, where Lazio was as much of a carpetbagger as she was. Clinton told a friend, as she was well on her way to racking up visits to all 62 counties, that upstate New York was a lot like Arkansas. And indeed, she seemed at home there, mastering the details of dairy-price supports and economic revitalization. At diners, schools and community centers she was able to connect one on one. Among nurses, teachers and social workers, she was a goddess who understood what they were up against. Rather than faulting her for muffing health-care reform, they rewarded her for trying.

The carpetbagging charge faded because Clinton was there so much. She was the first up and the last to bed, handshaking her way through county fairs and college campuses, just plain outworking her opponent. And as much as yuppie women may have been skeptical of Hillary’s motives, upstate women of a certain age greeted her like Oprah. They turned out for her, stayed afterward, lined up for autographs.

But Washington calls for deference to one’s esteemed colleagues, even from its celebrities. When Hillary offered that she hoped to form "bipartisan coalitions," Republican majority leader Trent Lott snapped, "I’ll tell you one thing: when this Hillary gets to the Senate—if she does, maybe lightning will strike and she won’t—she will be one of 100, and we won’t let her forget it."

—TIME, November 20, 2000

Questions
1. When and why did Hillary Clinton decide to run for the Senate?

2. Why was Mrs. Clinton accused of "carpetbagging"? According to the writer, what factors contributed to her victory over Rick Lazio?

TIME CLASSROOM