Split-Ticket Rick

...Lazio's campaign has been organized and staffed by Pataki...

...But it is Hillary who is calling the tune in defining her opponent...

...True enough, but that calculation didn't reckon with the sheer electoral firepower Hillary is capable of bringing into the state in the campaign's closing days...

...And the turnout...

...Hillary's numbers are wrong...

...Two dozen stay-at-home misanthropes, mostly angry housewives and unemployed men, talking about "Slick Willie" and how liberal the media are...

...If these deductions work like the mortgage-interest tax deduction, they will result merely in the deduction being piled onto the sticker price...

...Campaigning on this revival is harder than it looks...

...Often obsessed with minimizing his downside risks (he disowned the 1996 Dole campaign), Pataki was silent over the summer...

...He sounded like he was campaigning for the Senate in Ireland...

...We have conclusive evidence," Hillary said nodding, "that violence on TV affects the way people think, and the way some vulnerable people act...

...You would think both Republicans would be served by Lazio's talking up the recovery...

...Applause...

...The Clinton administration has been bad for state finances in profit-and-loss terms...

...In 1996, Clinton beat Dole by almost two-to-one (61 per-cent-31 percent...

...Rick Lazio will get the votes of many Hillary-hating Democrats...

...He has a genuine record on campaign finance reform, and won a major victory when he pressured Hillary into accepting a soft-money ban for the duration of the campaign...

...This spring he won Medicaid benefits for poor women diagnosed with breast and cervical cancer...

...He passed the Long Island Sound Restoration Act, and won a spot on the Earth List, an honor roll assembled by the League of Conservation Voters...

...The bureau demanded job figures from state authorities six weeks early...

...Well, I think that's baloney...

...In a world of anonymous day care, parents cannot assume that their children are protected from anything...

...But she moves on to what sounds like a rationale for federal fixing of drug prices...

...No—that era is already over, and responsibility for its ending rests with the way George Bush has reformed the Republican party...

...Exactly where she was going with this "vulnerable" trope became clear later that morning, when Hillary addressed the National Council of Jewish Women in East Rockaway...

...and the huge gap between what New York sends to Washington in federal taxes and what it gets back...

...Meanwhile, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics came to her aid back in the summer...

...Then they showed her a union highlight film: five minutes of the CSEA members striking—chanting, throwing things, making up-yours gestures at the camera—and not a second of any of them working...

...Since 1992, New York's annual contribution to the federal government has risen by $55 billion—an amount that exceeds annual state tax revenues and could erase the state's worrisome debt in about seven months...

...All Republicans who win statewide in New York do so on the strength of Democratic defections, but Lazio is going to need an unprecedented number of them...

...It hadn't been a very good morning for Lazio...

...Their annual meeting consists of three days of political-action seminars and just two of union business, and for much of the afternoon, they dance around to 1980s schlock-rock songs like "Gonna Make You Sweat," "The Heat Is On," "1999," and "The Best...

...When Hillary Clinton went to Riverdale last week, she had no trouble drawing Hadassah Lieberman, Bronx borough president Fernando Ferrer, and congressman Eliot Engel, who flew up from Washington to be at her side...

...Advertisers "encourage children to become consumers before they become citizens," and "the children who most often search the Internet are between 2 and 11...

...While she made clear that she thought most of her 14-year-old interlocutors could watch gritty movies without being affected, "for whatever reason, there are some people who cannot handle it...

...He's going to have to run at least 20 points ahead of Bush to win...

...When Lazio visited his considerably more high-powered event, a Rockland County business breakfast, his fellow Republican congressman Benjamin Gilman sent a proxy...

...It's a record that would resonate even among liberals, if only he could get voters to focus on it...

...So adults, too, have to live under a regime designed for children...

...There Lantos declared, "You can have a clone of Gingrich or you can have a stateswoman of remarkable proportions...

...Aren't we...

...Unrest is Job One...

...She is as forthright as any Democrat in championing handgun licensing and registration...

...Patricia Gore and Marcia Lieberman have raised sons who know what it means to honor their mother and father...

...She wants to make college tuition and long-term health care tax-deductible...

...She may not know as much about taxes as Lazio, but Warren Buffett does, and he criticizes Lazio's proposed tax cuts on the grounds that he, Buffet, has a lower effective tax rate than his secretary...

...It's because Lazio knew Hillary would wind up beholden to such Jacobins that Lazio's media adviser Mike Murphy decided to brand him the "mainstream" candidate, and set up a bus called the Mainstream Express...

...Whoa, Dobbin...

...The region, taken as a state, would rank eighteenth in private-sector job growth, according to Stephen Kagann, Republican governor George Pataki's chief economist...

...Months earlier, Hillary Rodham Clinton had drawn overflow crowds to this same Hilton ballroom, but Lazio had had trouble filling it...

...With Hadassah Lieberman, she visited senior citizens at the Riverdale YMHA where Mrs...

...they're people who wouldn't vote for Hillary in a million years...

...Hillary is quite correct that, if we were designing Medicare today, it would contain a prescription drug benefit...

...they look for adult authority," she says...

...In part he's trying to repeat the smiling, "positive" 1992 campaign in which he toppled the smart but Washington-tainted Democratic incumbent Tom Downey...

...There were a lot of guys in there who are going to vote for both Gore and Lazio," one of the journalists said...

...6 million New Yorkers generally vote in presidential elections...

...Children look for limits...

...One misstep: When Hillary tried to practice her Yiddish, she pronounced the word kvelling to rhyme with "sniveling...

...Hillary's attempts to link him to Newt Gingrich are unfair in the sense that "Gingrich" long ago lost any denotative meaning and turned into an imprecation, a way of calling someone a jerk...

...It consists of two fancy restaurants (one unfinished) and two boutiques right on the Hudson—hermetically separated by a mammoth railroad viaduct from the parts of town that really need help...

...It's not that Hillary doesn't have good issues: She does, particularly for a downstate electorate...

...Hillary arrived—it's her third visit—and danced along with them...

...Then it challenged a New York state labor department report that found Upstate growing at 2.5 percent, a rate high enough to jeopardize Hillary's Upstate basket-case strategy...

...Then, after a pause, they began to clap...

...Those close to Lazio used to think that keeping the race tight— within 3 or 5 points—would leave their campaign in good shape going into the final weeks...

...it just doesn't resonate...

...A quarter of the boys and two thirds of the girls raised their hands...

...In a moment of eloquent honesty, Blaine Harden of the New York Times remarked that this wonkish grinding "helps explain why a race that seems so compelling from a distance can be so soporific viewed up close...

...if they're much older than 11, they're not children...

...She may not command two-to-one loyalty from New York's voters, but her husband does...

...Lazio has wound up defined as a harsh and dangerous rightist...

...He sponsored a major piece of affordable-housing legislation in 1997...

...Upstate New York may be in recovery, but it's not so far along that people in the poorest parts feel it yet...

...Hillary began the week with a series of Jewish events...

...The result is not just an authoritarian politics (which depressingly few people seem to mind anymore) but a condescending one...

...He's not a dope...

...Lazio is an immensely appealing candidate, a salt-of-the-earth guy who represents the mid-Long Island district he grew up in...

...The slogan is fair enough...

...Lazio has a larger, ideological problem, though...

...Lazio's problem has been compounded by Pataki's own ambiguous role in the campaign...

...You have only to drive down Newburgh's main street, almost car-less the way Soviet bloc streets used to be, past the once-beautiful-but-now-blown-out row houses and mansions, the empty sidewalks, the taped-up storefronts, the social-service outlets, the drug-rehab ads, the Cheques Pagados outlets, to get the measure of the place: It's a largely Hispanic welfare town, with a lot of poverty and some potential...

...No there weren't...

...Which is why this urban revitalization project stinks...

...At a Modern Orthodox junior high just outside of Queens, no sooner was the shofar blown than Hillary asked the assembled eighth graders if they thought violence in the movies was a problem...

...Hillary led by 7 points, 50 percent-43 percent, and had caught Lazio in a statistical dead heat in the upstate areas that were supposed to provide him with pure electoral gravy...

...It sounded like her point was that, while most of us are upstanding citizens, we owe it to society to live under a regime of soft censorship, for fear of inciting the criminally insane among us...

...But we've always had different rules for children...

...At the Zumtobel lighting plant in Highland, he applauded businesses whose employment growth "will keep our sons and daughters from having to move to other states, other countries, to make a life...

...He's the congressional representative on the Holocaust Restitution committee...

...She may not have the ear of all the city's AFL-CIO unions, but AFL-CIO president John Sweeney does...

...Kagann makes a plausible case that Pataki's broad repeal of Mario Cuomo's anti-business taxes deserves much of the credit...

...But Lazio and Pataki are in a position similar to that of George Bush in 1992...

...And the issue on which she is winning this race is the upstate economy...

...With her "vulnerable" schtick, Hillary seeks to apply that politics to more and more sectors of the adult population...

...She picked up the endorsement of Elie Wiesel ("my friend Elie Wiesel," to Jewish audiences thereafter), and traveled to a hospital with California congressman and Holocaust survivor Tom Lantos ("Tom and his wife are really good friends...

...There were three...

...His pollsters were stunned recently to find that an overwhelming majority of New Yorkers think Lazio—who has broken from a firm pro-choice line only on such matters as partial-birth abortion—is "pro-life...

...So when Lazio claimed in the first senatorial debate that the region had "turned the corner," Hillary jumped all over him, and she's accused him almost daily since of turning his back on the region...

...Now that Hillary and Lazio have agreed to a soft-money ban, Lazio's staff doesn't expect to see another nickel of the money...

...Yeah...

...Hillary may not know how to pronounce kvelling, but Joe Lieber-man does...

...She's confrontational on the stump...

...Most promising, he's trying to win with Daniel Patrick Moynihan's pet issues: the regressiveness of the FICA tax, which is higher than the income tax for three quarters of New Yorkers...

...He has also taken a page out of Al D'Amato's campaign book by offering each corner of New York its "fair share...

...BY CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL Long Island Last week, two journalists were milling around outside the Pearl River Hilton an hour northwest of Manhattan, where Republican senatorial candidate Rick Lazio had just finished a breakfast address to 200 members of the Rockland County Business Association...

...Later, Hillary said, "We are fortunate that Al Gore chose Joe Lieberman in so many ways...

...If Pataki has been a difficult friend for Lazio, other New York Republicans have left him to twist in the wind...

...To travel with the candidate is to be surrounded by mid-level Pataki aides loaned for the duration...

...Upstate New York has been undergoing an economic revival over the last half-decade, and even liberal senator Charles Schumer said in July that the upstate economy had turned around...

...Last week on the campaign trail, Lazio tried to change his tune...

...At the time he gave up the race, Giuliani still had $6 million of the $22 million he'd raised...

...Now that George W. Bush has abandoned the state to Al Gore, Democrats look set to repeat the drubbing...

...Well, if there are less than a million of them, Lazio is cooked...

...But it's New York mayor Rudy Giuliani who has most angered the Lazio campaign, which considers him to have basically stolen millions of dollars bestowed by contributors around the country for a run against Hillary...

...She started by talking about television violence, but immediately veered into her news-making Message of the Week: a call to ban all advertising to children...

...Worse, a Quinnipiac Poll, showing Hillary drawing a majority of the vote for the first time, had been published hours before...

...Lazio's team was also shocked that the Quinnipiac poll showed a vast margin of voters find Hillary more focused on "the issues...

...But they're all hard-left issues...

...They're also the kind of people you draw when you run a campaign that shies away from sharp contrasts on matters of government and takes as its slogan: "You just can't trust her...

...Hillary wants the high tide of liberalism back, and thinks the children will thank us for it...

...Two hours after invoking the biblical injunction to defend Medicare, Hillary assured a union rally in midtown Manhattan, "When I visit a school, I thank the janitors...

...So Lazio is trapped in this neither-fish-nor-fowl, doesn't-add-up Bush Republicanism, whereby citizens are urged to give vastly more power to Washington on the assumption that Washington will just delegate it back to their communities and let them do what they want with it...

...Lazio might not be drawing big crowds, they reasoned, but hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers long ago made a solemn, if silent, vow to pull the lever against Hillary on Election Day...

...It's getting Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...Gore currently leads, 57 percent-29 percent...

...mumbling, no one thought to note the tautology of this "conclusive evidence": If they're younger than 2, they don't know what the Internet is...

...To put it differently, he's going to have to deprive Hillary of a quarter of Al Gore's votes...

...She tends to blame the region's spectacular economic failures on a handful of private-sector villains: airlines, energy companies, Wall Street—and has mastered a briefing-book full of statistical arguments with which to defend her points...

...Useful as the V-chip is, Hillary says, the issue "isn't just violent programming...

...But she sounds most radical when she gets onto prescription drugs...

...Then, "I know Al Gore and Joe Lieberman will defend Medicare because I know their mothers...

...The silliest statement last week came from George W. Bush, who warned that if Al Gore is elected, "the era of big government being over . . . is over...

...Arkansas, by contrast, gets $1.40...

...He transferred to the party and to Lazio the $1.9 million he was required to transfer by law, and not a penny more...

...In the midst of the horrified At the time he gave up the race, Giuliani still had $6 million he'd raised for a run against Hillary—and he's keeping $4 million of it...

...Those who distrust Hillary have always suspected that, for her, the political appeal of children is that they are not competent to defend themselves as citizens...

...Lazio, like so many of his fellow GOP candidates, has succumbed to the temptation to prove his bona fides on education and entitlements with big-spending programs—$97 billion on schools alone, which exceeds by a factor of six the 1993 Clinton "stimulus package" that Republicans rejected on the grounds it would wreck the economy...

...We do have a First Amendment that says adults can see anything they want...

...A trip to an urban revitalization project in Newburgh typified Lazio's dilemma...

...Clinton pronounces a word like "yan-fternoon," to note that 60 percent of her $22 million in campaign contributions has come from out of state, is to realize that the "carpetbagger" issue remains a ripe one, if handled subtly...

...She paints the region as a wasteland and claims that, if Upstate were a state, it would rank 47th in the nation in job creation...

...We pay for the drugs— through the research—and we pay for the FDA, which tests the drugs...

...Lieberman's mother is a member...

...The event last week at which Hillary came most alive was the annual delegates' meeting of the Civil Service Employees Association, a particularly far-out branch of AFSCME that includes nurses, maintenance workers, and janitors...

...He's right to contrast this with Hillary's centralizing bias, and her focus on federal tax incentives: "If you do as I say, you qualify to keep your own money," he says mocking his rival...

...Like Al Gore, Hillary is at ease bullying an audience into applause...

...The FDA is not a service to drug companies but an enforcement agency...

...There's a constant barrage of materialist advertising . . . children are an irresistible market of 79 million...

...As for the solution, Hillary is very specific...

...In 1978, at the high tide of liberalism, the FTC sought control over advertising...

...And just wait and see what October will bring...

...you do...

...New York receives 85 cents in services for every dollar in taxes, Lazio notes...

...Get it...

...Hillary arrives at her bleak diagnosis by citing figures from Cuomo's era...

...More silence...

...But in fact, Lazio does represent one of the more attractive, libertarian sides to the 1994 Republican revolution: its focus on devolution and local control...

...She opened her YWHA remarks by looking at the assembled and asking, "Isn't it wonderful...

...The trouble is that Republicans are slicing their own version of baloney...

...There are still minuscule debates over the role of government, but it's precisely in the debate over the size of government that Republicans across the country have most loudly cried "Uncle...

...Her biggest applause line in recent weeks is: "You can be from New York but not for New York...

...New York ranks third in the nation in population and forty-ninth in employment-generating military spending...

...This is a recipe for incoherent campaigning...

...She spoke from the sanctuary, but the back wall had been slid open to link it to a mammoth ballroom, and Hillary packed both...

...Lazio claims his philosophy in Washington will be "I don't know what's best for schoolchildren in Ulster [or whichever] County...

...To hear the Illinoisan way Mrs...

...But unless Hillary does something to create far more than now exist, he's probably not going to get a million of them...

...Even if he turns on the local accent a bit in debates and in front of working-class crowds, he seems perfectly natural when he describes policies that "would have went into effect...

...This is a familiar refrain: "Vulnerable" has become perhaps the key word in Hillary's rhetoric...

...Two years later, on First Amendment grounds, Congress removed the authority of the FTC and other executive agencies to regulate commercial speech...

...So why do we have the highest drug prices in the world...

...These are not crossover voters...

...Lazio has an impressive legislative résumé, one that includes, as he puts it, "helping write the first balanced budget in a generation...

...He often follows up one of his favorite applause lines—that teacher competency tests are necessary because "our children should come first"—with the Honeymooners-ish: "An' whass wrong widdat...

...The problem is, Lazio has never figured out quite which issues he wants to stress and what kind of race he wants to run...

...While total federal spending has gone up, New York's cut of the budget has gone down...

...But in the closing days of September he released an ad for Lazio and began touring with him...

...The aged crowd looked back silently, as if to say "Isn't what wonderful...

...Hillary may not know as much about the economy as Lazio, but Rubin does, and he backs her plan to use 20 percent of the surplus over the next 10 years to pay down the debt...

...That became evident last week when she made her campaign-defining economics speech at Columbia University shoulder-to-shoulder with Robert Rubin and Warren Buffett...

...The claim isn't untrue...

...Since then, he has found pretext after pretext to keep the remaining $4 million as a personal war chest for future use...

...So problems involving them are inevitably solved not by consent but by coercion...

...So Lazio's advisers began doing the same dismal math that the smarter of the two journalists had already done: New York has 5 million Democrats and 3 million Republicans...

...One was reminded of those Third World satrapies that make prisoners sent to the firing squad pay for the bullets...

...Over the last 14 months, she has spent at least half her time there, much more than Lazio...

...increasingly difficult to see how that will happen...

...These elements could coalesce into a powerful Hil-lary-has-stood-up-for-Arkansas-but-I'll-stand-up-for-you message...

...It lost three military bases, in Seneca, Rome, and Plattsburgh, the surrounding areas of which are responsible for a third of upstate population losses...

...But the fact that it's actually a bad example of a public-private partnership only shows that, unless Republicans get into the big government game in earnest, they're always going to be picking up the Democrats' sloppy seconds...

...True, the Newburgh visit provided a chance for Lazio to have a camera op with the charming Mary Crabb, one of the state's few black mayors, and to talk about how this is "a good example of a public-private partnership...