Rambunctious Rick
Carlson, Tucker
Rambunctious Rick Lazio hits the ground running with a little help from the McCain team. BY TUCKER CARLSON Buffalo, N.Y. IT IS THE LAST WEEK IN MAY and representative Rick Lazio has come upstate...
...When it comes time to speak, Lazio walks not to a podium but to a low stage in the middle of the room...
...Lazio tries anyway, recalling his immigrant grandmother—"'Mama,' we called her...
...Lazio doesn't come off as a liberal, exactly...
...It is the same music—the same five songs, led by Fatboy Slim's "Praise You"— that used to play at McCain rallies...
...Even with more time, he probably couldn't have found a better staff...
...He also mentions the Great South Bay, Rome, the Adiron-dacks, Long Island Sound, the Southern Tier, the Hudson Valley, Linden-hurst, Montauk, Massena, West Islip, and the 2nd Avenue subway...
...He evokes "the postcard perfect vistas of the Hudson highlands...
...For a time during the speech, Lazio mimics George W. Bush...
...A local ABC correspondent leans in with a microphone...
...Republican women's groups look pretty much the same everywhere, except in Buffalo the women drink Labatt's with lunch...
...Except that the event—an on-the-record political event in the famous New York Senate race—was held without full choreography, without even tape marks on the floor, showing the candidate where to stand for the cameras...
...Instead he boasts of his work in Congress on behalf of the environment, the disabled, the elderly poor, missing children, residents of public housing, and "thousands of low-income women with breast or cervical cancer...
...And well enough to recognize the importance of ethnic politics...
...Mike Murphy appears and is immediately surrounded by a group of reporters...
...The event is quickly approaching chaotic...
...Bush promises to topple the tollgate to success...
...The press horde is trying to cross the plant floor to get near him...
...Both have their website addresses and (noticeably similar) logos painted on the side, as well as on the roof, in the event of news coverage by helicopter...
...Scores of reporters are scurrying over machinery, trying not to get their Rockports caught in the moving parts...
...This is true...
...The rest would wait in the parking lot for the speech afterwards...
...Lazio spends the first 20 minutes wandering around the room chatting with supporters...
...No one from the Lazio campaign seems to care...
...The bus is brand new and loaded with amenities, but in most ways it looks a lot like John McCain's old bus...
...I've heard Hillary say the same things 100 times," said one New York reporter afterwards...
...Rick Lazio is...
...Though he has not had particularly good relations with newspapers in his home district, Lazio now talks about the importance of "being accessible to the media...
...Rudy Giuliani dropped out of the New York Senate race on May 19, less than two weeks before what would have been his official nomination...
...So does Lazio...
...These facts are not insignificant in New York, where ethnicity still matters...
...On the other hand, Lazio isn't running against Hillary Clinton on ideological grounds...
...There are close to 100 reporters following Lazio...
...He is getting better with the press, for one thing...
...Youth may help him...
...Lazio is already competitive with his opponent in the polls...
...This is where Lazio will hold his last event of the day, the unveiling of his campaign bus...
...Rick Lazio in May in Buffalo looks a lot like John McCain in January in New Hampshire...
...Bush frequently couples the words "opportunity" and "responsibility...
...And so on...
...Lazio is standing next to an enormous vat of 2 percent, talking to a man in a hair net...
...He also brought on Keith Nahigian, a longtime GOP advance man who was as responsible as anyone for the distinctive look and feel of McCain rallies during the primaries...
...Lazio even hired the guys who did the pyrotechnics and confetti at McCain's events...
...he asks...
...At times during his speech, Lazio talks about New York so much he drifts into a kind of travelogue...
...Hillary Clinton isn't from New York...
...As Lazio peered down at a text he seemed never to have read before, Luntz piped up in something above a stage whisper: "Does he shave yet...
...But Murphy could also defend Lazio by responding: Who cares...
...McCain may be inspiring the Lazio campaign in other ways as well...
...Or it may have something to do with the people running Lazio's campaign...
...Journalists hover about hoping to catch the words, but Lazio's staff don't shoo them away...
...Lazio's is the Mainstream Express...
...Murphy is sensitive to the suggestion that his latest candidate has simply purchased a prefab campaign...
...It may be a coincidence...
...Will there be any similarities between this campaign and Senator McCain's...
...Since the New Hampshire primary, lots of politicians have tried to appropriate elements of John McCain's campaign style...
...He was in a mood to carp...
...The air smells like curdled milk...
...He's running against her on geographical grounds...
...This left Rick Lazio little time to Tucker Carlson is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Lazio pledges to tear "down barriers to success for everyone...
...And a familiar one...
...His problem seems to be that he is not certain what he wants to say...
...It oversimplifies it to say, 'Just add water, it's McCain,'" Murphy says later...
...Again and again and again...
...By chance, I got a front row seat at the speech and wound up sitting next to Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster who until last month was working for Giuliani...
...At this point he abandons the conservative part of compassionate conservatism...
...The first stop on Lazio's bus tour is a small, family-owned dairy in downtown Syracuse...
...Lazio is slated to speak at the GOP state convention in a few hours, but first he must address several hundred Republican women gathered in a hotel ballroom...
...a state senator who spoke earlier in the day informed the audience that his wife finds Lazio attractive...
...Lazio's silhouette, lone and towering, plays across the flag...
...This is in flattering contrast to his opponent, who hesitates to give any interviews at all...
...Once his speech is over, Lazio and many of the convention delegates move across town to a minor league baseball stadium...
...Someone has positioned a light to project on the candidate from below...
...Until he reaches the part of the speech about policy...
...Well enough to give guided tours...
...Lazio doesn't mention a single red meat Republican issue...
...So he says a number of different things, all in different people's voices...
...But he doesn't seem like the ideological counter to his opponent, either...
...Not really," says Murphy, who happens to be holding a briefcase with Straight Talk Express luggage tags still attached...
...Lazio's staff invites everyone in...
...If you were going to enter the most intensely covered Senate race in the country a year late, you'd want to do it the way Lazio has...
...His acceptance speech at the state convention, for instance, was enough to remind New York Republicans that until two weeks ago their candidate was just another congressman from Long Island...
...Which made it, in its way, a devastating attack on Hillary Clinton...
...In New York, politicians still reminisce from the stump about the Old Country, about stickball, pushcarts, and summer baths under the fire hydrant...
...He probably did...
...Lazio notes his own "record of reform and results...
...It's harder to pull off if you're a baby boomer attorney who grew up in suburban Long Island...
...No one has ever claimed that Lazio didn't spend childhood afternoons soaking up earthy wisdom from a grandmother who glimpsed the Statue of Liberty for the first time from a boat...
...While the crowd waits for Lazio and governor George Pataki to arrive, music blares in the background...
...As a boy standing in her kitchen, I liked to hear Mama tell the old stories as she stirred a pot of sauce—stories about Italy and Amer-ica—and maybe sample a meatball or two...
...Not that Lazio's entry into the majors has been entirely graceful...
...The floor is wet...
...The whole scene is enough to send OSHA inspectors scrambling for their handcuffs...
...So he bought one whole, or close to it...
...It's only 8:45 in the morning, but the inside of the dairy is sweltering...
...The camera crews are working to thread their equipment around low-hanging pipes...
...Lazio is Italian...
...assemble a campaign staff...
...The campaign is organized...
...Lazio hired, among others, Mike Murphy, McCain's chief strategist and message guru, and Dan McLagan, a former McCain spokesman...
...According to Lazio, "Our goal must be nothing less than ensuring that no child is left behind...
...He seems committed to answering most questions...
...That's the point Lazio and his surrogates make above all others...
...The similarities, one has to admit, are striking...
...It can be an effective shtick...
...Under the circumstances, Lazio has been both wise and fortunate...
...It's a beautiful picture...
...It still sounded like a pasta commercial...
...IT IS THE LAST WEEK IN MAY and representative Rick Lazio has come upstate to be ordained as his party's candidate in the Senate race against Hillary Clinton...
...Lazio does seem young, but that's not his problem...
...He waxes rhapsodic over "the quiet calm of the Finger Lakes...
...In the end nothing terribly newsworthy happened...
...Late last week, Lazio was still negotiating with John Weaver, McCain's old political director, to become campaign manager...
...Lazio praises "the storied skyline of Manhattan...
...McCain's bus was called the Straight Talk Express...
...In a typical campaign only a few of them—"the pool"—would be allowed to follow him inside...
...Both were leased not simply to carry the candidate and his staff, but to serve as the site of mobile press conferences...
...Lazio greets some of the reporters by name...
...Bush frets that children will be left behind...
...Bush identifies himself as a Reformer with Results...
...An AP reporter plucks a couple of cartons of orange juice off a conveyor belt and sticks them in his coat...
...Message: Rick Lazio knows New York...
...Lazio does a better job than most...
...He holds the microphone loosely in hand...
...Behind him is a school-bus-sized American flag, draped across the wall...
...Luntz had just come from giving a speech to a group of GOP county chairmen ("Sponsored by Pepsi," according to the program...
...His wife, Patricia, is Irish...
Vol. 5 • June 2000 • No. 37
