A Yuppie Courts the Unions
Caldwell, Christopher
A Yuppie Courts the Unions Hillary makes a play for organized labor. BY CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL New York City It's five minutes before Hillary Clinton is due to arrive to address a rally in the...
...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...
...When my opponent tells you where he's from," she says, "I'll tell you what I'm for...
...He's the only politician I know who can come into your local, make a lot of promises, and break them the next day...
...On the one hand, this canned, televised, counterfeit-poster style of presentation only feeds the perception of carpetbagging...
...Hillary has taken comfort in very early polls that show her 16 points ahead of Lazio among Jews...
...After a perfunctory mention of the National Labor Relations Act, labor came up almost not at all...
...She focuses on funding issues, construing Hyde Amendment votes on government-funded abortions as votes on abortion itself...
...ideological—issues over local, commonsensical, bread-and-butter ones...
...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...
...There are a lot of trade-offs to having Long Island congressman Rick Lazio as an opponent instead of the New York mayor...
...She's trying new options...
...When she greets supporters her eyes take on a kind of goggly, maniacal gregariousness that leaves her looking like Snow White's stepmother...
...Three department-store workers from the RWDSU were wearing their navy-blue windbreak-ers indoors...
...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...
...She has dropped from her oratory the heretofore constant references to Lazio as a tool of Newt Gingrich...
...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...
...The campaign volunteers handing out the made-to-look-homemade signs (New York Loves Hillary...
...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...
...Hence these carefully scripted attacks along ideological fault lines...
...The building trades unions have endorsed her (some more enthusiastically than others—the plumbers are lukewarm...
...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...
...Heating up partisanship is good politics for a New York Democrat, of course, but Hillary hasn't yet figured out how to do it...
...This was the event where Hillary turned on a dime and realized she was no longer running against Rudy Giuliani...
...It's not just her public embrace of Suha Arafat...
...No, it certainly is not...
...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...
...Internet advertisements loom out of the parking lot in front of the building...
...This part of lower Manhattan—at the corner of Hudson and Houston—used to say "light manufacturing...
...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...
...She's annoyingly immodest on the stump...
...Can a California strategy work in New York...
...Saatchi & Saatchi is across the street...
...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...
...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...
...Labor plays a special role for Hillary, particularly since Giuliani can no longer be used as a scarecrow to rally blacks...
...it's her private and sneaky courtship of Israel's enemies...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...This spells catastrophe...
...Lazio brings a lot of pluses...
...Lazio has created some bad blood...
...vote effort in minority neighborhoods...
...Even down here on Hudson Street, all sorts of new people are moving in...
...Hillary remains desperately worried about the accusations that she is a carpetbagging interloper, and tries to defuse them at every turn...
...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...
...It's not that she's not from New York—it's that she's not from anywhere...
...But Lazio brings a couple of disadvantages, too...
...No, who...
...A lot of new ideas are going to work in this election, and a lot of old reliable ones are going to fail...
...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...
...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...
...The seat the two are vying to fill, after all, is that of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, for decades the Senate's leading intellectual...
...A Democrat trailing among New York Jews is like a Republican trailing among Indiana gun owners...
...Penguin Books is a block away...
...Hey, you know who lives in one of the apartments in there...
...The Hillary campaign's premise—that Giuliani had some magical appeal to Jews that Lazio lacks—is wrong...
...Nor did it sound like a union event...
...It is Hillary's unconcealable indifference to the fate of Israel that's wrecking her with that constituency...
...Thus, she is able to cast Lazio as one who "would deny choice to women serving in the military...
...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...
...Lazio is not a one-man get-out-theChristopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Other than that, this was a union event only in name...
...now it says "espresso...
...Television also heightens national—i.e...
...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 I Pakistani real estate mogul Rafat 1 Mahmood, both of whom have long records of opening their campaign spigots primarily to anti-Zionists...
...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 underemployed and the underinsured—has been working beyond her wildest dreams...
...He'll run stronger upstate than Giuliani, since he brings none of the alien urban sensibility a New York City mayor does...
...Unions are the engine of minority turnout in New York...
...So has the State Federation of New York (the umbrella group that embraces all of New York's AFL-CIO unions...
...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...
...And that's what makes the Potemkin village aspect to the unionism at the Carpenters' hall so striking...
...All sorts of them...
...And even this union "hall"—with its beige carpets and its picture windows, its formica dais surrounded by cameras and the bomb-sniffing 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...
...BY CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL New York City 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...
...Television is a good medium for Hillary because she doesn't wear well over long exposure or up-close...
...She shouts over applause, as if it's an interruption...
...That polarizes the race, and polarization is a big part of the Clinton strategy...
...Right now Lazio looks like the stronger candidate...
...Television also helps Hillary in two other ways: First, it fosters a gravitas gap between herself and Lazio...
...Monica Lewinsky...
...Who knows...
...Hillary for New York...
...Hillary's supporters reckon New Yorkers would rather replace him with a celebrity than with a boyish-looking Long Islander with a fat lip...
...I kind of admire the guy," a scornful Jack Kittle, political director of the painters' union, says of Lazio...
...Phony, inau-thentic, 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...
...Hillary desperately wants the base-to-base contest she had until Rudy Giuliani left the race...
...he said...
Vol. 5 • June 2000 • No. 37
