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Mike McCurry is a CNN analyst and a former Clinton White House press secretary. He has provided allpolitics.com with Web-exclusive analysis. |
Mike McCurry: Hillary Clinton poised to fill some big shoes
By CNN Analyst Mike McCurry
April 27, 2000
Web posted at: 5:29 p.m. EDT (2129 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Late in the summer of 1981, as a newly-appointed press secretary to Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-New York), I had the pleasure of watching a legend in American politics mesmerize the residents of upstate New York.
As we traveled across Western New York on a re-election campaign bus tour, Sen. Moynihan could rattle off the history of Seneca Falls, discuss the efforts to remove hazardous waste from West Valley, and trumpet his successful effort to reduce tolls on the New York State Thruway. No one mistook him for some Manhattanite city slicker, or worse, a captive of the Washington power elite.
I could not help but make comparisons to Moynihan as I watched Hillary Rodham Clinton successfully navigate CNN's Town Hall meeting at the University of Buffalo on Wednesday night. Despite Wolf Blitzer's laudable efforts to make news, he pre-ordained the outcome of the evening with his very first question to Mrs. Clinton: 'Are you, or are you not, a real, true-blue New Yorker?'
Her immediate answer, good for the opening, stressed the work she has done on the national scene to improve the lives of children and to address exactly those things that she is asked about over and over again by every average New Yorker.
But when she stood, (a la her husband's deft mastery of the Town Hall format), and began to engage her audience, it was clear the next 57 minutes were about her willingness to go the extra mile for the citizens of New York who do not live in the heavily Democratic boroughs of the downstate regions.
I'm not sure her national CNN audience stuck with the details about highway improvements in the Western tier, the lack of broadband Internet connections in Buffalo, the economic needs of upstate New York, or the lucky question about farming on a day in which she had announced a new tax relief proposal for family farmers, but by the end of the session, there was no question that Hillary does her homework.
She passed the Blitzer test: Is this about you or is it about us, those who count upstate New York as home?
Hillary loves New York, to the point that she laid to rest a lingering suspicion about her Senate candidacy -- that it is merely a stepping-stone to a presidential bid in 2004. She took herself out of that contest about as Shermanesquely as can be done. She also made it clear that her home is now New York, win or lose this November.
I think a former president might get a little lonely building his library mostly alone in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Mrs. Clinton also handled requisite questions from the citizen audience on tough issues like she had been in New York all her life: School shootings? Need to do more to enforce laws on the books. Palestinian state? Let's not disrupt the peace process. Partial-birth abortion? A sensitive position with some nuance that acknowledged the need for protection of both mothers who make awful choices and babies who deserve options like adoption.
She even side-stepped the closing question on whether she'd pick the Cubs over the Yankees in a World Series. Not a likely scenario, she said, but get back to me if it happens.
Wolf will.
Hillary Clinton decided that a national CNN audience was far less important to her than communicating something about her passion to serve the people of New York in the United States Senate. That was a smart candidate at work.
There are six long months to go, but Mrs. Clinton seems intent on proving that a national celebrity candidate can show the folks outside New York City that she cares about the whole state and can be smart, charming and shrewd as she goes about their business.
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