Hillary Raises Democratic Money, GOP Ire

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Marie Cocco

Oct 29, 2002

There is always much ado about the importance of being Hillary.

The former first lady has become this election season's first toastmistress. She offers a few words at a fund-raiser, stands for a strategic picture with a candidate, places a phone call to a wavering recruit for a must-win race or presides over the off-camera collection of checks from Democrats hungry to share a rubber-chicken dinner. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) has played all her roles with virtuosity, and so has achieved a new level of stardom in her party's fall show.

Not to mention in Republican campaign ads.

She has always had two faces, her image dependent not on who she really is but on who casts a gaze upon her.

To Democrats she is a heroine, the embodiment of achievement for those who admire her version of contemporary womanhood, her brains, her guts. To Republicans she is a demon, a fixation of those who still break out in hives just recalling her plan for universal health care, not to mention her husband.

Clinton broke historical ground when she went from the White House to the Senate. Now she breaks political records.

Her fund-raising prowess is becoming legendary, her Washington home a political salon and piggy bank. It is the venue of choice for Democrats who beg her to make their campaigns among those enriched by her golden touch. She is generous in obliging, having raised huge sums for Senate Democratic candidates. Still more unusual for a freshman senator, she's helped dozens of candidates for the House.

With her political action committee, HILLPAC, Clinton again has proved she can play with the big boys. Make that the very big and brawny boys. HILLPAC, according to the latest reports with the Federal Election Commission, has taken in some $2.9 million this year and distributed it to candidates in need of cash. That's about as much as the leadership committee of the House majority whip, Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas).

Here is one of the many differences between Clinton and DeLay: He is one of the most powerful men in Washington, controlling committee assignments and the flow of legislation and whether this lobbyist or that will get a pet project slipped into a bill. DeLay is to move up to majority leader if Republicans retain control of the House. Clinton is just a freshman.

And so the inevitable assumption, among the Hillary lovers and the Hillary haters, is that she will, one day, use her star power for a shot at the presidency. Like all theories about Clinton, this one ignores certain realities. Like, for example, the other role Clinton has played in this campaign - leading lady in Republican attack ads.

In Louisiana: "There's something about Mary Landrieu's record ... It looks just like Hillary Clinton's," declares the National Republican Senatorial Committee in an ad against Sen. Landrieu.

In Montana: "When President Bush needs Max Baucus' votes, Baucus votes with New York's Senator Hillary Clinton - 78 percent of the time!"

In Arkansas, Colorado, Missouri, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Clinton appears as a bobble-headed doll in a pink business suit, alongside her Democratic colleagues Sens. Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts. "Say no to the Daschle Democrats!" urges the ad's sponsor, the conservative interest group Club for Growth.

No one, in either party, can count the number of Republican fund-raising letters that breathlessly invoke Clinton's name with the same menacing intonation heretofore reserved for Kennedy. No one - surely not Clinton and not Kennedy, who's gotten used to this - cares to try.

"He wears it as a badge of honor," said Stephanie Cutter, a Kennedy aide. Clinton blithely ignores what she often refers to as the background noise.

She moves at a frenetic pace, but with that calmness of tone and deliberate emphasis on substance that marked her winning Senate campaign. At home, it works - a New York Times poll earlier this month showed Clinton with higher job-approval ratings than New York's other senator, Chuck Schumer. But the very same week, a Marist poll found that 69 percent of Americans do not ever want her to run for president.

When the topic is Hillary Rodham Clinton, all effort at logic and prediction is wasted. Is she a fund-raiser par excellence? Yes, for both sides. Destined to follow her husband to the White House? Or more likely to take Kennedy's path to a Senate career people on both sides of the aisle consider brilliant?

There is something about Hillary. No one has yet figured out whether she will eventually be one of history's convenient villains, or one of its great victors.

-- Anonymous, October 29, 2002


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