Don't Call Her Clinton
It didn't take much to see the writing on the wall or on the banners or the buttons.
Hillary Rodham Clinton is out. Hillary is in.
It happened in Purchase, N.Y., last Sunday, when the first lady of the nation announced she was officially a candidate for the Senate from New York. The announcement took a back seat to the bigger dispatch: This is all about Hillary.
In a move that rivaled Stalin's PR team, Clinton was wiped clean from the candidate. The name wasn't in the 20-minute campaign film biography. It wasn't on the banners. In fact, it was barely mentioned. OK, maybe as an aside when the announcer boomed, "Hillary is accompanied by Bill Clinton." And Bill didn't say a word.
So on Monday, Hillary took the name and the new campaign out for a spin. And all the senior citizens waiting for her at the Buffalo airport seemed to like it. And all the technology entrepreneurs at her afternoon speech liked it, too. And it made for a nice slogan: just her, out on her own, starting fresh, telling folks about herself. Kind of like Mary Tyler Moore throwing her hat in the air in Minneapolis, Hillary threw her hat into the ring in New York.
And by Monday afternoon, her likely GOP opponent, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, was taking jabs at a song played during Hillary's announcement ceremony. Whatever Billy Joel meant when he wrote Captain Jack (the common theory is it was about drugs), did he ever envision it would be fodder for a political attack on a Senate candidate?
"The message that got out, they say by mistake, and sometimes if you read Freud can be the most powerful message, the message that got out by mistake was 'Let's say yes to drugs!'" cried the mayor.
The gloves are off. In what is expected to be one of the nastiest political campaigns in U.S. history, there are now no more sideways critiques, no more hedged accusations. This is all-out war, and Rudy Giuliani took the cue: If he's not running against the first lady (and all the respect that title affords), then all bets are off. If she's just Hillary, then she's fair game.
(Hillary's campaign, by the way, denied any involvement in picking the music of Billy Joel, a native New Yorker whose classic cuts include I'm in a New York State of Mind.)
By Tuesday, all hell broke loose. At least, that's how the tabloids touted the religion flap. A New York paper, The Village Voice, got hold of a campaign fund-raising letter sent out on behalf of and signed by the Mayor, which criticized Hillary's "hostility toward America's religious traditions".
"I think it was wrong to use religion as a political weapon, and he should know that," defended Hillary, on a swing through Albany. This time, instead of leaving it to her spokesman, Howard Wolfson, as she usually does, Hillary spoke for herself: "I intend to run a campaign based on issues and ideas, not on insults."
So Rudy countered: I'll releasall my nasty fund-raising letters, if you pay back the government for all those rides on Air Force jets! Put up your dukes.
As Hillary winds up her first official week on the campaign trail, she is smarting from a few new bruises. But the hits were on her, not the family name or history. How long will that last?
Well, this week ,an article in the Webzine Salon.com detailed bumper stickers in the volunteer room of Giuliani's campaign headquarters. One says: "What did Vince Know?" As in Vince Foster, the former deputy White House counsel who committed suicide in 1993.
You can wipe away at the Clinton name all you want, but the really nasty stains always stick.