Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine Read Online Free PDF Page B

me. As he recalled it, the First Lady, still playing Hamlet in the New York media, pulled the official aside.
    “What do you think?” she asked. “Should I run for the Senate?”
    “No,” he replied. “I think you should be a college president, head of a foundation. I think you’ll have more of a platform.”
    The First Lady looked stricken, and quickly turned away.
    “She was pissed at me for that advice,” says the former high-level official, who believes Hillary holds his honest advice against him to this day. She didn’t want his opinion, he says, unless it was to tell her what a great senator she would be.
    Further assisting the “reluctant candidate” narrative, reporters from the New York Times wrote any number of stories about state Democrats who were “begging her to run.” 5 That too was an exaggeration. New York Democrats in fact already had a suitable candidate for the job, a woman who’d been waiting her turn—Representative Nita Lowey of Westchester County.
    Among the real power players in New York politics there was a noted lack of enthusiasm for a Hillary bid—particularly among Senators Chuck Schumer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the man Hillary would replace. Moynihan was an intellectual giant in the United States Senate, a former aide to Kennedy, LBJ, and Nixon who was respected on both sides of the aisle. From the outset, the wry, bespectacled legislator seemed reserved, at best, about the idea that Hillary Clinton might replace him. “He had not much use for the Clintons,” one reporter who covered that race tells me bluntly.
    Although they have since mended fences, at least superficially, Schumer secretly opposed Hillary’s political career from its start, as she eyed a bid for a New York U.S. Senate seat in 2000. Like most every other political observer, Schumer was initially shocked by the audacity of a first lady from Arkansas, who was born in Illinois, deciding she was entitled to a seat held by such a heavyweight as the retiring Democrat Moynihan. And in Schumer’s state, too. Where she’d never lived.
    “Schumer is a man of great ambitions,” a Senate colleague tells me with obvious understatement. “I’m sure that living in the shadow of Hillary Clinton wasn’t the most pleasant position for him.”
    Michael Medved recalls a dinner between the then-senators where he observed the interaction between Schumer and Clinton. “I will tell you what was evident was a lot of eye rolling,” he said, on both of their parts.
    With Moynihan’s retirement, Schumer was to become the state’s senior senator. That title—which means something, at least, within the clubby otherworldliness of the U.S. Senate—would be severely undercut if his junior colleague were Hillary Clinton. She would outshine him and outdo him. She was a celebrity, after all, who wouldn’t need Schumer’s help to shine—and wouldn’t need him to be her lodestar in the U.S. Senate. She would steal New York newspaper headlines without even trying. She’d only have to show up. Schumer at best would be her understudy. Chuck Schumer, man of destiny, didn’t care for that one bit. And like many other Democrats, he wondered if the country really owed her a Senate seat from a state she never lived in simply because her husband couldn’t keep his pants on in the Oval Office.
    As for the carpetbagger charge, Hillary was convinced she could overcome it through sheer endurance and persistence, long underappreciated qualities that are the Clintons’ hallmarks. The state was too perfect a choice for Hillary to do otherwise.
    In an expansive interview for this book, Mrs. Clinton’s eventual opponent, Republican congressman Rick Lazio, summed up the advantages the state offered her: “A solidly Democratic state, big union organizations, big cities with machine politics where you could turn out the vote, and the biggest media stage maybe in the world.
    “It was a pretty compelling case that they come to New York,”