FIRST LADY DOESN’T WOW ALL WOMEN

To warm smiles and friendly greetings, Hillary Rodham Clinton slowly worked the formica tables at lunchtime, stopping to chat with diners over plates littered with chicken bones and posing for snapshots at Granny’s, a favorite eatery here, whose cozy name also points an icy finger at a potential pothole in the path of the first lady to a U.S. Senate seat from New York.

Clinton apparently grates on grannies. Not just literal grandmothers, polls suggest, but women over 45 in general and women here in the semirural, heavily Republican upstate region in particular.

When Clinton arrived in this small city at the foot of the scenic Finger Lakes region, the first stop on a three-day “listening” tour that concluded Saturday, most of the modest crowd standing outside Granny’s in a broiling sun burst into cheers. Scrambling to get close to the first lady, who moved along the line in an ice-blue raw silk pantsuit, shaking hands, signing autographs and receiving bouquets of flowers and drawings from children, many of the spectators beamed and commented that she “looked even better than on TV.”

But Anna Fuksman, 48, looked on with disgust. “I think both of them, Bill and Hillary, just to look at them, I get a bad feeling,” said the longtime family day-care provider, surrounded by five of her tiny charges.

When asked if the first lady’s advocacy for education and child care issues made any difference to her, she sneered.

“No, that doesn’t cut any mustard with me,” she said. “Also, I don’t believe in her abortion programs. I have two kids here who are adopted and they are just precious gifts.”

Fuksman is not alone. A recent poll released by the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion spelled out the problem: New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the bellicose putative GOP nominee for the seat being vacated in 2000 by retiring Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, leads strongly among male voters and is running even with Clinton among female voters, a group that should be her strength and may be crucial to her success. Clinton leads Giuliani 54 percent to 37 percent among women under 45. However, ominously, Giuliani takes the lead, 45 percent to 35 percent, among women 45 and older. Neither Clinton nor Giuliani formally has declared candidacy.

As for why polls indicate older women frown on Clinton, Fuksman brightened and said: “I think because we’ve been around a little. We know what it’s like to live with a man. We’re just normal people with normal consciences. I think the whole thing is about reality: Is this woman for real?”

A number of younger women in the crowd, however, expressed similar feelings. Standing with her five young sons and holding a placard boldly scrawled “Go Home, Mrs. Clinton,” homemaker Linda Stearns, 36, said she has a number of gripes about Clinton.

Looking at her children, she said: “I want them to know what’s right and what’s wrong. Buying your way into a Senate seat when you don’t even live in the state is wrong.”

Furthermore, she said, her face tightening, she has problems with the Clintons’ “morality.” When it was suggested that the Monica Lewinsky affair involved the president, not the first lady, she shook her head. “She didn’t do it, but she’s been his right hand in a lot of things like Whitewater. . . . How can we raise our children in a moral nation when our leaders are totally contradictory to that?” she asked.

For Joan Said, 22, there is no question that Clinton is for real or that she should be New York’s next senator. Holding a poster emblazoned “Senator Hillary! You Go Girl,” she plans to vote for Clinton.

“Absolutely,” she said, “because I believe she represents the needs of all women from children to the elderly.”

Countering the poll, Caroline Droleski, 80, can’t understand why anyone would oppose Clinton.

“I’m for her all the way,” she said. As for why most older New York women seem less impressed, she laughed and said: “They probably haven’t heard her talk yet. A lot of them are hard of hearing, you know. My advice to Hillary: Talk loud.”

While polls concerning an as-yet-undeclared race in an election more than a year away undeniably are premature, analysts offer a number of theories on the roots of Clinton’s current problem among women. The most compelling concern is morality.

“There is a difference if you’re a woman of 35 or 55 in terms of your attitudes on what she should have done with Bill Clinton and what she should do with her own life. Clearly the age is telling on that,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist poll, referring to how Clinton handled the impact of the Lewinsky scandal, and its humiliatingly salacious details, on her marriage.

“Older women would have dumped him. The idea that the Clintons have worked things out, in a unique sort of way, is not appealing to these women,” Miringoff said. “There’s no magic to the age of 45, but clearly younger, more professional women seem more encouraging of her candidacy. Older women seem to lock her into her more traditional first lady role, aren’t as inclined to give her credit for hanging in there during the impeachment trial and just are not as willing to grant her this idea that she now wants to strike out on her own professionally here in New York.”

Pollster John Zogby, president of Zogby International, uncovered much the same sentiment in a poll he conducted in March, the last month in which many surveys still showed Clinton with a slight edge on Giuliani; currently, she trails him in most polls.

“Back in March, we asked an open-ended question: What’s the No. 1 thing you’d ask Rudy if he ran for the Senate. The top three questions, all tied at around 10 percent, were: `What would you do about education? What would you do about health care? And, what would you do for upstate New York?’

“The No. 1 thing people would ask Hillary was: `Why are you running in New York state?’ Twenty-five percent asked that. And, for the next top answer, 11 percent asked, `Why do you stay with him?’ ” Zogby said.

Moreover, as longtime Chicago-based Democratic strategist and Clinton friend David Axelrod said: “Remember, there’s never been a major statewide elected female official in New York state and I don’t think that’s entirely coincidental. I think there is traditional resistance among women when there’s a woman candidate involved, a kind of strange sort of resentment. I think it’s something she’s going to have to deal with. How she breaks that down is going to be a challenge.”

As the summer peaks, Clinton finds herself in a frustrating place. She is the issue, instead of the issues dearest to her such as health care and education, in which New York voters, particularly women, seem most passionately interested.

Clinton’s so-called summer listening tours of the state, in which she meets with selected people and jots down their concerns in an effort to educate herself about the state, so far have generated far more media sizzle than voter steak for the first lady’s somewhat anemic non-campaign.

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A Zogby poll released July 26 indicated that between June and late July, Clinton’s support among voters dropped slightly to 39.4 percent versus 49.1 percent for Giuliani. Moreover, her favorability factor dropped from 62 percent in May to 53.1 percent in July; Giuliani’s rating rose from 57.4 percent to 63 percent over the same period. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.8 percent.

Should she run, of course, Clinton will have to deal with a number of even more pressing problems than her wobbly stand among older women. These include Giuliani’s gleefully in-your-face, take-no-prisoners tactics. The mayor, often called “Manhattan’s Mussolini,” made a pilgrimage to Arkansas last week to underscore that Clinton, Arkansas’ former first lady, never has lived in New York state, a fact he further flaunted by flying the Arkansas flag over New York’s City Hall.

Indeed, Clinton virtually will have to immerse herself in the political equivalent of Clorox to eradicate the stubborn stain of “carpetbagger,” a sobriquet frequently hurled at her last week here.

Unfortunately for Clinton, conservative upstate New York represents every foot of the state outside New York City and its surrounding counties of Rockland and Westchester to the north and Nassau and Suffolk on Long Island. Moreover, upstate contains the majority of voters. Among them are plenty of older women who remained in the economically depressed region when younger women left over the last 20 years, and they are the ones who tend to vote.

Unless something drastically changes, upstate New York will be the crucial battlefield on which this election will be won. Giuliani reigns in upstate support, 56 percent versus 30 percent for Clinton. On Giuliani’s own turf, New York City, Clinton leads 61 percent to 29 percent, according to the Marist poll, but New York City represents less than a third of the state’s vote.

“The key point here is that at this stage we only have 9 to 10 percent of the voters still undecided, so there’s very little wiggle room. Hillary’s going to hope that Rudy makes mistakes, that some of his people stay home on Election Day and hope for new voters,” said Zogby, citing African-Americans and more women.

Clinton particularly needs every woman she can get, which means she must convert some of her current critics.

“It’s a significant mission, but not an easy one,” Axelrod said. “The good news is that she has 15 months to do it.”