Finally, A Race

Finally, a Race
Hillary Clinton offers New Yorkers a rotten deal. Last night Rick Lazio showed that he's a serious alternative.
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Thursday, September 14, 2000 1:54 a.m. EDT

NEW YORK--The Empire State has finally got itself the start of an honest race for the Senate. Rick Lazio's campaign at last achieved genuine launch Wednesday evening, with his televised debate in Buffalo against Hillary Clinton.

Not that mighty issues of public policy were settled with last night's match--the first of three before voters head to the polls. But for the first time in this campaign, there was a clear forum in which Hillary--shorn, at least on stage, of her Secret Service insulation--had to face some serious questions.

I had feared that Rep. Lazio would defer to her because she is a woman (recall the power of her pink outfit back in the days when the questions got fierce over her commodity deals). But Mr. Lazio did not treat Hillary as a girl, or a victim, or as some sort of visiting royalty--which is mainly how she has been playing in her tours of the diners and nursing homes of down-home New York. He treated her as an adult, asking her to take responsibility for her some of her own more peculiar words and deeds. So did the questioners, who, among other things, asked Hillary if she was at last ready to apologize for blaming her husband's Monica fiasco on that old "vast right-wing conspiracy."

If you live in New York--and I do--this comes as a mighty relief. It has been a long and wearing season watching Hillary try to cash in on her celebrity career as first lady, as if New York's seat in the Senate were some sort of consolation prize for putting up with Bill all these years. And it hasn't seemed as if a live contender was out there to challenge her. After Mayor Rudy Giuliani dropped out of the race in May, a fair number of voters didn't have any sense of what the new guy was like. Some didn't even know his name.

Public distaste for Hillary still translated into a built-in base for the unknown Rick, and this has been bringing him enough support to cast the race at this stage as a dead heat. The numbers recently have been running 47% to 45% in Mrs. Clinton's favor, according to the Zogby International polling firm. But with 6% still undecided (and the remaining 2% for minor candidates), Rick needs to pick up a slice more support in his own right. Otherwise, says pollster John Zogby, she wins.

That could be alarming even if you're not from New York, because in the end this race is bigger than New York state, bigger than usual party politics. It is also, as Mr. Lazio's campaign strategist Michael Murphy told me earlier this week, "a blood fight against evil."

That's an unfashionable word--evil. In rich modern America, we tend to pretend it turns up only in realms long ago or far away. But what Hillary Clinton offers New York is a deal rotten at the heart. All we have to do is overlook her adventures in Arkansas finance; overlook her over-the-top commodity profits; overlook her complicity in Bill's misuse of interns, the Oval Office and the public trust; overlook that creeping sense that lying and coverups--once objectionable enough to bring down the Nixon presidency--have now become an acceptable part of American democracy.

If we overlook the inference that, as a New York City cabdriver told me recently, "she's a little sleazy," and--as the same cabdriver said he would--vote for her anyway, she is prepared to turn us into her personal village. Maybe while using New York as the handy platform for a presidential bid, she will even try to reward us with helpings of the goodies to which she is for some reason presumed to have privileged access in Washington. This woman, who, in the jargon of modern therapy, has been for years the "enabler" of her impeached husband's unscrupulous ways, is now offering herself an the Great Enabler of us all. Poor old New York state, to be offered such a temptation, corrosive to the core of the American character.

The question now is whether Mr. Lazio can keep it up. Hillary has been working the terrain for more than a year, hitting every county in the state. Mr .Lazio's campaign is scarcely more than three months old, and it shows. At his Manhattan campaign headquarters, the phones and lights don't always work, nor do some of the volunteers. You'd think an underdog, tax-cutting, anti-big-government campaign fighting for publicity against the Hillary celebrity steamroller, would be eager to add, say, a Wall Street Journal editorialist to the press list. Yet it took me three rounds of requests over two weeks, culminating in a surprise visit to the campaign office before I started receiving regular notices of his campaign schedule.

An attempt earlier this week, via this same campaign office, to locate chief campaign strategist Michael Murphy was about as productive. The Wall Street Journal--a name that in some quarters will open doors--just didn't do much for the media handler who answered the phone. The conversation, once I had given the name of my paper, went thus:

Do you know where I might contact Mr. Murphy?

"I'm unaware of that as of right now."

Do you know how I could go about finding out?

"No."

And that was that.

Abandoning Mr. Lazio's campaign headquarters as a source of information on the campaign, I went through other channels, and eventually caught up by phone with Mr. Murphy. He explained that Mr. Lazio's biggest selling point is that "you can trust him to fight for you and for New York. He will say it, do it, live it."

Wednesday's debate for the first time gives a sense that there is some throw-weight to Mr. Lazio's campaign--not just a Clinton to vote against, but a candidate to vote for. Until now, Mr. Lazio, for all his "Mainstream Express" bus tours, has been visible to New Yorkers mainly by way of TV ads--most of them assaults from the Hillary camp.

"He needs to be present," says Mr. Zogby, the pollster. Given how late Mr. Lazio got into this contest, "one would think that he'd be running a marathon." After last night's debate, we can say at least that Mr. Lazio is in the race.

Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Thursdays on OpinionJournal.com and in The Wall Street Journal Europe as "Letter From America."