THE EMPRESS OF THE EMPIRE STATE

...But it's also quite possible that people are giving vent to a hem-of-her-garment idolatry...

...A statistic that Hillary liked to cite was that if upstate New York were a state, it would rank 49th in job creation...

...Outside of the New York City metropolis, all but two of them (Oneida and Saratoga Springs) have lost population in the 1990s...

...They were blocked by police a mile down the road at Highway 23...

...Still, endorsing her at all is evidence that the pitched battle between partisan loyalty and intellectual dispassion that has raged for decades in Moynihan's head has now come to an end—and intellectual dispassion is dragging its dead and wounded from the field...

...And with the "listening" activists, she showed a sense of humor that her friends have always attested to but that the public has never even seen a glimmer of...

...Hillary's advisers minimized the press at these "impromptu" events—by canny misdirection if possible, by locking them out if necessary...

...Nice of them to have drinks for us, you'd've thought...

...To "jump-start" things, you understand, and transform vicious circles into virtuous ones...

...She's the closest thing we have to Princess Di," one older woman at the counter said earnestly...

...And since "there are a lot of jobs parents can't do by themselves," there is a vital national interest in intensive government intervention at every point of this education-health-parenting loop...

...New York has 83 cities with more than 10,000 people...

...At the next seat over, a tiny 75-year-old woman who'd driven an hour to come to Brook's said with a smile, "She's probably out having a cocktail...

...But if you happened to have your own car and arrived a couple hours early, you would have seen two of Hillary's campaign volunteers, in white polo shirts and white caps, turning a picturesque old red barn into a cold-drinks stand...

...Wood is Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...How will she do it...

...On Wednesday afternoon in Oneonta, outside an office Hillary was visiting, there was a friendly streetcorner argument between Cathryn James and Ed Palumbo...

...the Democratic chairman of Delaware County, a used car dealer, and chairman of the county council's ethics committee—an irony of which he was charmingly cognizant...

...Finally, and for exactly the same reason, the press could ask scandal questions, but should never expect to get an answer—ever, ever, ever...

...There were also a number of protesters carrying "Hillary Go Home" placards...

...And it was for real...

...He doesn't have my vote," she says...

...Most of the 250-odd journalists came from Albany or Oneonta on one of the five buses ordered up by Hillary's exploratory committee...

...This atmosphere left the candidate really comfortable, really poised, throughout the trip...

...Father called son a moron...

...Economically, at least...

...When a dairy farmer at the Bassett Healthcare Center in Cooperstown described herself as a member of the "agricultural community," you guessed that she was also a member of the Democratic activist community...

...that she will reverse the old dynamic of married voting by shaming men into backing her out of fear of what their wives will think...

...You could see the way the campaign was thinking: Write "T" instead of "Tea"—that'll make it look like the kids did it...

...If so, this Senate campaign may be just the beginning of Hillary's transformation into a colossus of American politics...

...Health, in turn, implicates education, because "if you're going to get children off to school, you need healthy parents...

...If she can pull it off, though, she'll be free to pursue a more nineties-style politics that is concerned less with redistributing money than with regulating lifestyle...

...that her appeal is Kennedy-like, unshakable even in shifting political winds...

...And yet, Hillary's reference to Moynihan as "the wisest New Yorker" could signal an attempt to break with the legacy of Cuomo, who seems to think he has a political copyright on the adjective "wise...

...If Hillary presses the Arkansas parallel too insistently, she will alienate voters...

...The day Hillary arrived upstate, interim census figures brought more ghastly news...

...These were the Marys and Carols and Susans of the world, not the Ariadnes and Alexandras and Zoes...

...But nope—they wouldn't serve any lemonade for another hour...

...But the waitresses and the housewives who were squealing, muttering Ohmygod, quivering, and clapping their hands to their heads were not among them...

...At the Baseball Hall of Fame, some goateed lout kept leaping up and down behind a police line shouting, "Yo...

...First, this whole concept of running for the Senate was to be understood as someone else's idea, and she'd been dragged into it kicking and screaming ("The more people talked to me, and the more I listened, the more comfortable I got...

...Where the trip was a triumph was in Hillary's interaction with the public, track three of the ONE GERMAN TV CORRESPONDENT DESCRIBED HER OPENING SPEECH BRILLIANTLY AS "AN APPEAL FOR MORE ATTENTION AND LESS SCRUTINY...

...The result," Hillary says, "is we all pay more and more for less and less...

...But this was different, especially for the women...

...I'm here to say that I hope she will go all the way...

...HER APPEAL MAY HAVE BECOME KENNEDY-LIKE...

...As her policy recommendations grew more concrete and detailed, it became clear that Hillary was trying out a daring campaign strategy...

...It's that she drives crowds absolutely berserk...

...You're left with a disgruntled proletariat that forty years ago would be earning enough at General Electric or Studebaker to have a paid-off house and a boat in the yard, and an information-age upper-middle class consisting largely of publicly funded social-service workers...

...You don't have to answer hard questions...

...All last week, journalists noted that massive crowds turned out wherever she went, even to watch her walk from a limo into an office build-ing—and that the crowds dispersed just as quickly...

...In the event, Hillary's schedule was as grueling as any day in the last week of a campaign, with tardily scheduled stops at Brook's (no cameras), a storefront Internet employment center (announced in local papers but not to the journos trapped on the press bus), and the Baseball Hall of Fame (camera pool only...

...It's my hope we can start thinking about these things in a broader way...

...Nonetheless, if she's talking about poverty, she has a point...

...If Hillary is starting her campaign here, it's because this is where she thinks the race will be decided...

...Hence the "listening" tour, the second track of the campaign...

...that she will transform Middle American women into the aggrieved vengeance-seekers that feminists always said they ought to be...

...The nurse replied that the most important task of any nurse was to be by a patient's bedside...

...It's true that upstaters see celebrities so seldom that they give warm welcomes—whether to Geraldine Ferraro or Reggie Jackson...

...You can imagine the reports: Father smokes...

...Breaking with redistributionism would involve neutralizing New York City's blacks with sweet talk—a much harder task than her husband's similar neutralization of the national black leadership...

...Joan tried to fob herself off as having just blown in on a whimsy, but she let slip that her late husband had been James Wood's political mentor in nearby Delhi (pronounced Del-High...

...visit...

...Cathryn is a politically active caseworker at the Department of Social Services who was bellowing for Hillary...

...Hillary Rodham Clinton kicked off her "listening tour" of upstate New York on the 900-acre farm of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whose Senate seat she hopes to fill when he retires next year...

...Ultimately, though, Hillary's fate may have less to do with the nature of her politics than with the nature of her fame...

...At the Coop-erstown health-care panel, Hillary mentioned to a nurse that "when I see the amount of time nurses are spending on paperwork, arguing and fighting the bureaucracy, it's an enormous waste...

...That was the cornerstone of George Pataki's upset win over Cuomo in the 1994 governor's race...

...But most of the "neighbors" were like Joan Ball...

...They were mixing lemonade in pitchers on a rickety table, and posting clumsily lettered signs that read, "Iced T—Lemonade . . . 250...

...Hillary's reckoning seems to be that the state will break down into three parts: First, New York City, where the traditional Democratic base will give her a solid victory—and black outrage over the Amadou Diallo slaying will produce an electoral shellacking if Mayor Giuliani gets the nomination...

...That makes voting patterns hard for any political consultant to game...

...Of course, deindustrialization of the sort upstate New York has gone through in the last four decades is not really the same thing as the time-out-of-mind boondock primitivism of the Ozarks...

...Yo, Hillary...

...Hillary's good-government ideal is a particular "early-intervention" program that was launched, conveniently enough, in nearby Elmira...

...Her "listening" works like satellite transmission...

...I'm glad you raised that," she said...

...In downtown Syracuse, which before the rise of San Diego was the most lopsidedly Republican metropolis in the country, you can drive through block after block of old business district without seeing any-„ body...

...Second, the press was welcome to ask the "carpetbagger" question—^h^re do you get off running fo^ office in a state where you're not even a registered voter?—until the public ceased to hear it and begged them to drop the issue...

...The essence of Cuomoism has been to trust the federal government with ever more tax revenue in hopes of getting ever more money for development...

...If you're listening, you don't have to talk...

...HILLARY'S FATE MAY HAVE LESS TO DO WITH THE NATURE OF HER POLITICS THAN WITH THE NATURE OF HER FAME...

...If the family is not there for kids," Hillary says, "it's really hard to feel comfortable belonging to a larger group...

...I got slaughtered," he added...

...At her Oneonta listening session, one of the panelists brought up the problems of rural welfare delivery...

...Hillary was setting ground rules, and there were three notions she wanted to knock into the press's collective head...

...The politics that results is an unapologetic articulation of the principles in her book It Takes a Village...

...How about a virtual hug...

...Hillary knows what she wants—and what she wants is the most socially interventionist, antilibertar-ian politics to have been enunciated by any politician in recent decades...

...One is that Hillary has won a kind of cheap celebrity that draws curiosity seekers, that she's a George Murphy or Fred Grandy of our times, and will soon fade from view—whether she can make a credible run for Senate or not...

...I have a lot of firsthand experience with rural poverty...

...She beams an ideologically loaded suggestion out to a citizen, and when it pings back to earth in identical form, she takes it as an urgent plea for reform...

...Margaret Hart, a retired senior citizen standing alongside, said, "Mine neither...

...It involves sending social workers on regularly scheduled preemptive visits into the homes of children whose parents are deemed to put them "at risk" of wrong parenting...

...Certainly there were activists among the crowds lined up way into the parking lot...

...But at each of these, Hillary had a cameraman along, doubtless gathering the raw material of ads that months from now will air across the Empire State to leave the impression that Hillary has been mingling with New Yorkers since the days of the Knickerbockers...

...most of the press probably arrived upstate having packed their bathing suits, their tennis racquets, and A Bar-Hopper's Guide to the Adirondacks...

...When the hollering grew unig-norable, Hillary looked up, smiled, clasped her hands to her own shoulders and said, "Here...

...When, seconds into an education panel at the SUNY College of Oneonta, cameramen shouted that her microphone was off, she smiled and said purringly, "Well, maybe someone can come turn me on...

...That was minutes before Hillary blew in...

...I think she's going to win...

...Gimme a hug...

...that Hillary's Monica-earned martyrdom has cast her in a mythical narrative for the tabloid-reading, soap-opera-watching public that doesn't usually care about politics at all...

...Listen and learn...

...One mystery to the whole campaign is therefore that Daniel Patrick Moynihan would be endorsing Hillary in the first place...

...But even before such sympathetic audiences, it was a strange sort of listening Hillary was doing...

...The press part—Hillary's speech at the Moynihan farm—looked like a flop...

...Hillary's handlers know something others don't, and it ought to be a source of alarm to Rudy Giuliani, Rick Lazio, or whoever runs against her...

...At Brook's House of Bar-B-Q-s—a local diner that boasts of the "largest indoor barbecue charcoal pit in the east," where a sign urging guests to "Eat It With Your Fingers" hangs between various moose and deer trophies—the crowd experienced something like Beatlemania...

...Hillary was actually running her campaign on three tracks upstate: one for the press, one to rally party activists, and one to build mystique among the public...

...To those who had warned her that a Senate run would be tricky because New York ain't Arkansas, she was replying: Oh, but it is...

...And Giuliani ought to start losing some sleep over the fact that most of the voters who were sufficiently anti-Hillary to take the day off and march around with signs are not particularly pro-Giuliani...

...What does this mean...

...I mean to go all the way with her...

...One German television correspondent described her opening speech rather brilliantly as "an appeal for more attention and less scrutiny...

...For instance, if people have no medical insurance, their emergency costs get covered in higher fees for the insured...

...Second, the suburbs, which will resemble recent national elections in that the two parties will split the moderates and whoever gets his base more riled up against the other guy's party wins...

...For the centerpiece of Moynihan's Senate career, particularly since he became ranking Democrat on the Finance Committee, has been to show through rigorous accounting that New York suffers the highest gap of any state between what it sends to Washington and what it gets back...

...In smaller industrial towns like I Canajoharie—with its boarded up hair-1 dressers and bowling alleys and restau-^ rants—it looks like it's four o'clock in i the morning all day long...

...But no—the worst of it is that it might be Giuliani, not Hillary, who winds up lashed to Cuomo's government-handout model, leaving the New York mayor with little in Hillary's program to criticize as "too liberal...

...The classic way to clobber a liberal upstate is to associate this economic decline with high-tax, business-repelling liberal economic policies pursued from Nelson Rockefeller to Mario Cuomo—and to mobilize the many Eds against the lucky Cathryns...

...When someone mentioned that Hillary wasn't a big one for cocktails, the old woman said, without irony, "That's right...

...Mother drank two beers...

...My God, I almost forgot," he said...

...Conservative Republicans long warned that the big cost of Giuliani's act of treachery was that it sowed skepticism in his own party...

...New York, with the fourth-largest rural population in the country, has quietly reached the point where it is, like Illinois, a one-metropolis polity...

...When Hillary's ad guru Mandy Grunwald pulled up in her car, they shared a joke with her...

...The pre-trip itinerary the exploratory committee sent to reporters had listed only two events a day...

...The essence of anti-Cuomoism is to show that New York always gets played for a patsy at that game...

...Her son Jim was more forthright—when asked what he thought about the district's liberal Republican congressman Sherwood Boehlert, he admitted having been Boehlert's Democratic opponent for Congress in 1984...

...Ed is a 44-year-old who works two jobs, cooking at Wendy's and delivering the local paper door to door by bike (he can't afford a car), who estimates the local unemployment rate at "95 percent" and refers to the candidate as Hillary Rotten Clinton...

...When asked whether she was a political beneficiary of the Lewinsky scandal, she replied, "I'm looking forward to meeting with New Yorkers...

...And since education is a "bedrock of our democracy," our very survival as a nation is imperiled when people engage in the wrong kind of "parenting...

...Her America is a world of vicious circles...

...Her rhetoric veered between embarrassing boilerplate you're supposed to get other people to say ("I have been a tireless advocate all my life on behalf of causes I believe in") and giddy, girlish smiley-talk ("I'm excited about it, and I'm really looking forward to it...

...Basket case" is not an exaggeration of upstate's predicament...

...Hillary then drew the conclusion that when you see the amount of time nurses are spending on paperwork arguing and fighting the bureaucracy, it's an enormous waste...

...No one is clearing out faster than working-age white males...

...But the performance was more disciplined than it looked...

...Some were outright politicos, like the portly and witty James Wood, who wore a tidy Clark Gable mustache and a blazer jingling with Gore 2000 buttons...

...She probably can't win outright in these heavily Republican areas, but if she can keep the race close at all she will be a senator...

...Which may have explained, more than any political symbolism, the ultimate rationale for having the kickoff at the Moynihan farm: It's private property...

...Maureen Somerville, for instance, a pro-life mother of eight who was protesting with friends outside Brook's, has written him off...

...Giuliani's endorsement of Mario Cuomo in the 1994 governor's race would then come back to haunt him...

...Not until a handful of 8-to-10-year-old children—cute as buttons and as ethnically diverse as the upstate population would permit—had been rustled up to ladle the stuff out to credulous (or cynical) network cameramen...

...At Moynihan's farm she claimed (dubiously) to have backed her husband's final welfare-reform bill...

...Granted, Moynihan's endorsement was tepid...

...Third is upstate...

...She's too busy thinking about the children...

...Buffalo, which decades ago was the country's eighth-largest city, is now fifty-sixth—and it is still the second-largest city in the state...

...It is too soon to tell for certain, but there are two possibilities...

...New York's problems are more like a milder version of East Germany's...

...And the "listening" was all done at tightly controlled discussions (no press questions) with diligently vetted liberal panelists...

...When she added, "Thank you for bringing a lot of new and fresh ideas into the mix," she removed all doubt...

...The local color—about two dozen rustics—had been similarly pre-screened and choreographed...

...All these things are related," she says...