Rumors of Her Demise

By ERIC POOLEY

New York politicians like to think of themselves as gimlet-eyed operators who can handle the most treacherous terrain. Racial flare-ups, ethnic rivalries, battles between cop and civilian, upstate and downstate, Mayor Rudy Giuliani and just about everyone else--that's what makes New York politics a special kind of fun. Which is why, all over the state last week, one could hear the pols snorting over Hillary Rodham Clinton's West Bank fiasco. They couldn't believe that the First Lady would flunk such an easy test--sitting in silence while Suha Arafat, the wife of the Palestinian leader, accused Israel of using cancer-causing poison gas on Palestinian women and children. Suddenly the Democrats who had cheered her "exploratory" bid for a New York Senate seat were groaning about how badly she had screwed up--and wondering if she could cut it as a candidate.

Here comes the fun part. Some of those Democrats got so spooked that they spent the week spreading the rumor that Clinton was going to quit the race before she formally entered it. By trafficking in that gossip, they were inadvertently helping their archenemy, Giuliani--the Republican who is Clinton's likely rival for the seat. For months, the idea that Clinton would drop out had been the subject of a Republican whispering campaign spread by miscellaneous kibitzers and Giuliani operatives. They hoped it would be a self-fulfilling prophecy; maybe it will. Clinton's poll numbers have dropped, and Giuliani is spending some $600,000 on an upstate ad campaign designed to damage her further. (If she doesn't run, he won't feel pressured to--there's no glory for him in beating, say, Representative Nita Lowey--so he could shoot for a job like Governor, one more suited to his headbanging style.) The Democrats should have known better than to repeat the rumor. Maybe Clinton wasn't the perfect candidate they had imagined, but she was the best they had. And maybe they weren't as smart as they thought, either. After all, they just got used by Rudy again.

Some Clinton aides concede that Hillary was depressed by the Arafat incident. But they say she is in the race to stay. "If people think a few bad days are going to make her pout and go home, they don't know who they're dealing with," says one. The advisers insist that internal polls taken since the incident suggest it hasn't hurt her, even though Jews make up about 12% of the state's electorate. She remains where she has been, about 5 points behind Giuliani. Her advisers were against her making the state visit to Israel--avoid uncontrollable situations is the first rule of campaigning--but she went anyway. Once there, she felt she had to go to the West Bank to avoid playing favorites in the peace process. And when she got sandbagged by Arafat, Clinton couldn't denounce her on the spot without precipitating a bigger crisis. "Most people don't blame her," says an aide. "Those that do were Giuliani voters already. And hey--at least Yasser didn't show up."

That's looking on the bright side. But the fiasco is important for more than what it does to the Jewish vote; it's important for what it says about Clinton's instincts. A nimble candidate would have found a way to respond quickly. And a strong campaign manager might have talked her out of the visit. But Clinton has no manager and is her own strategist. Faced with howling tabloids, she retreated behind the haughty protective screen of her First Ladyhood. "It is unfortunate," she sniffed, "that there are any questions about what was a very straightforward occasion." A First Lady can get away with that kind of arrogance; a candidate can't. As she told a friend not long before her West Bank visit, she has been in the wheelhouse for all 10 of her husband's campaigns, but "it's different when you're the candidate."

A New Yorker close to Clinton describes the problem this way: "She can't stay way up in the clouds. She's got to come down." But she remains distant, shielded by her old, fierce band of loyalists (former chief of staff Maggie Williams has come back from Paris to help). Remaking herself won't be easy, especially in a year when the press is busy gauging each candidate's authenticity. So far, her attempts to turn herself into a New Yorker have been amateurish. When the Chicago native proclaimed herself a closet Yankees fan, when the Methodist disclosed her Jewish roots, when the advocate for poor children came out in favor of milk price supports--these moves made her seem craven, ham-fisted. When the progressive copied her husband's tactic of using party soft money to finance early TV spots, she looked no better than he. And when Bill Clinton granted clemency to a group of Puerto Rican terrorists--a move that some of Hillary's key Latino backers had lobbied for--she was silent at first, then condemned the move, angering the very interest group she was pandering to. Smooth.

Like him or not, Giuliani is who he is. Which may be part of the reason the mayor, despite growing Rudy fatigue, now leads Clinton among such crucial voter blocs as suburbanites and women. The numbers will change, her advisers promise, after she declares her candidacy and moves to the state early next year. But sometimes you wonder whether Clinton should start believing those rumors.