It’s another of the endless, orchestrated “news” events that dominate life on Capitol Hill. Ergonomics. Carbon dioxide pollution. Tax cuts. School violence. They meld together, with politicians straining to generate a smidgen of publicity from the stenographers of the press corps.
Except that this one involves Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.). It makes all the difference.
The committee hearing room is packed with spectators and press, including eight television cameras.
They’re on the scene for “Hillary,” the freshman “rock star,” as New York Daily News reporter Tim Burger puts it, in the staid Senate. Just like Oprah, Michael or Tiger, a first name suffices. It’s not the same for Peter (Fitzgerald), Paul (Wellstone) and Mary (Landrieu) or any other senators.
She proves articulate in pressing the case for worker protections, deferential to colleagues and sincere, if unwittingly ironic given her husband’s controversial pardons, as she underscores a “solemn obligation to speak for those who don’t have clout of their own.”
When the Senators Barbara–Mikulski and Boxer–speak, Clinton stands to the side with her somewhat odd, nearly continuous nodding. It’s a bit like one of those sports bobble-heads come to life, tilting forward at a gentle, 45-degree angle. It seems a reflexive motioning of agreement, perhaps born of so many such appearances over the years, and the attempt to project courtesy.
As soon as the half-hour set piece is done, she exits to what has quickly become a routine hallway tableau, marked by a covey of aides, security and persistent New York reporters, led by the persistent Daily News and New York Post, which cover her far more diligently than The New York Times.
She could exit in any one of a number of ways to avoid people and, with some regularity, does that. When she chooses not to, she still tends to play matters strictly on her terms. A quest for control seen at the Clinton White House, tinged as it was at times with an air of self-righteousness, does surface in the inherently more democratic environment of Capitol Hill.
“She is so hardened to media, so mistrustful of everyone, it seems, it is hard to feel that you are having any real connection, no matter how much time you spend with her,” contends Vince Morris, the young and genial New York Post reporter who has covered her virtually non-stop since her swearing-in.
Today, Morris and the pack are not captivated by carpal tunnel syndrome but, instead, by matters such as whether she is going to march in the New York St. Patrick’s Day Parade, a sensitive issue because the parade bans gay groups from participating. Clinton walks briskly down a hall, responding to the micro-queries and is about to enter an elevator when Morris gets to his tabloid employer’s real craving.
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Is it true that she’s filing for divorce from Bill?
Morris is not 100 percent sure of the claim’s origin (a German tabloid, apparently), but his bosses desire a response. She had denied it a few hours earlier, so now stares at the tall and genial Morris and affirms her denial, “Yes, Vince, my dear.”
The “Vince, my dear” is a hint of the suspicions she and her husband harbor toward the press. Now, as he stews in what may be his bucolic Chappaqua, N.Y., prison, she confronts the media almost daily as the family’s real center of attention.
As the “Senators Only” elevator door closes with her large retinue safely inside, the pack shares notes and gossips. As it does, the whirring of a motorized scooter is heard, and it passes by the pack.
It’s Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), a true power, all by his lonesome. There are no questions for him.
“It’s bizarre, surreal. I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Harry Hamburg, longtime ace photographer for the Daily News whose “marching orders are a picture a day of Hillary.”
The theater surrounding her can be extraordinary. Even as she seeks to dutifully deal with her more tenured colleagues, she is not quite one of them. Wherever she goes, she is mobbed. Burger has seen young girls wait hours to catch a glimpse of her, then squeal with delight to have a photo taken.
It’s much the same with adults, although catty remarks can be heard; perhaps mumbling about, “Where’s Bill?” or a reference to “Monica.”
They are not an overt presence, but she always has two Secret Service and at least one plainclothes officer from the Capitol Hill police near her. There also tends to be two, even three, aides. It’s a far bigger entourage than most senators, some of whom do, and can, travel solo around these environs.
Her early reputation is positive. Attendance on committees, including the budget panel, has been good, her questioning well-informed. She is treated respectfully even by Republican critics of the Clinton administration. In some cases, it’s probably a mix of hypocrisy, the civility of the Senate and the fact that, well, she’s a celebrity.
And, then, there are the newsies.
In the first month or so of her term, interns had to check voice mails every 15 minutes or so, lest they fill up, according to Jim Kennedy, her communications director and senior policy adviser. In the Clinton White House, where Kennedy worked as a deputy press secretary for the president, there were several dozen aides to handle calls. Now, there are basically two.
“Sen. Clinton, when are you moving [your office]?” was the first question after a press conference on Bush administration moves to rescind carbon dioxide regulations. She was switching from modest, temporary quarters that weekend.
“The New York media here tend to be less shy about asking silly questions than they might be in the context of the [White House] briefing room, where there is a certain shame factor that keeps people from asking those questions,” says Kennedy. “There’s more of a free-flowing atmosphere in the Capitol.”
Then there are imprecision, cheap shots and fabrications:
– A Page 1 New York Post “exclusive” by former Clinton adviser Dick Morris claimed that close analysis of the Clintons’ disclosure forms showed that she was lying and actually hiding many thousands of dollars in gifts given while she was first lady. That was bogus, based on ignorance of both the disclosure process and how gifts to the White House are handled.
– The Web site of the conservative American Spectator magazine asserted that after President Bush’s sort of-State of the Union address, “Senator Clinton pushed fragile Republican Strom Thurmond out of the way to get to the NBC New York affiliate’s camera crew,” with Thurmond saved by Sen. Edward Kennedy before falling to the ground. In fact, Thurmond, 98, did not attend the speech.
– An Oneonta, N.Y., paper put a conservative Web site’s doctored photo of the senator in a Nazi-like uniform on Page 1. Meanwhile, the conservative Washington Times wrote a story about her being “90 minutes” late for one committee meeting, which happens to virtually every senator. And the gossipy Drudge Report and The Washington Post carried on about her different hairdos, even the dramatic disclosure that she doesn’t always wear makeup.
Lost in high-profile coverage of furniture, china and pardons is how, in many ways, Clinton’s concerns, like those of colleagues, are maniacally local. It’s why a reporter like Marc Heller of the 34,000-circulation Watertown Daily Times is on her radar screen.
“I feared during the campaign that we would be fighting with the mob to get access once she took office,” said Heller. And, after she had her melodramatic press conference on pardons, with seemingly half the capital press corps surrounding her, “the futility of it all hit me and left me wondering if the next six years would be like that.”
But Clinton is nothing if not pragmatic, and Heller suspects that she knows that “little regionals like me are more interested in local matters,” like threatened closures of Ft. Drum in Watertown, home of the Army’s 10th Mountain Division.
It’s the sort of matter that now preoccupies the junior senator from New York.