Hillary Clinton’s Campaign Off to Pastoral Start

Hillary Rodham Clinton made her beginning Wednesday as a candidate rather than a candidate’s wife, a first for a first lady. And she made it so with all the trappings of the Clinton White House playbook.

Indeed, the day no one ever thought would happen was happening. The wife of an impeached incumbent president was all but running for Senate in a state she has never lived in, and she was talking about it on the edge of a hayfield in nowheresville New York, covered by 200 journalists looking like a Woodstock of the chattering class.

There was a backdrop of gorgeous rolling hills, the smell of freshly cut hay, the blessing of the man she would succeed and responses to questions she would not answer. (When asked about Whitewater and Monica S. Lewinsky, she calmly said the people of New York would decide, adding, “I think we’re past that.”)

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the retiring Democratic senator from New York, loaned Hillary Clinton his 900-acre farm in this central upstate hamlet to inaugurate a summer-long “listening tour” so she can later tell New Yorkers what she would do for them as their senator.

Sen. Moynihan’s wife, Elizabeth, set up a 25-cent lemonade stand in her barn for the media mob and even tried to get a kite airborne before the cameras started rolling. The wind wouldn’t cooperate.

But as the new candidate and the senator ambled side by side down his country road--she in her navy pantsuit and TV makeup, he in his weekend white pants and rubber duck shoes--the candidate couldn’t have asked for more. (What other novice politician has launched a candidacy live on national TV?)

The senator with the ethereal image who often remained above the fray during 23 years in Washington got right to the point: “I’m here to say I hope she will go all the way. I’m here to go all the way with her.”

Clinton smiled broadly and, speaking ever so slowly, got down to the business of her rebirth by talking about who she has long been and what she hopes to be for New Yorkers: an advocate for education and health care.

“What is new to me is being on this side of the microphone,” she said, “and talking for myself and talking on behalf of what I believe. And I’m looking forward to that.”

This came after she acknowledged the obvious. “I suppose the question on everyone’s mind is why the Senate, why New York and why me?”

Clinton’s most direct response was that she cares “deeply about the issues that are important in this state that I’ve already been told about and that I’m hearing about.”

A day earlier, as long expected, Clinton officially established a campaign committee, known as an exploratory committee, that allows her to raise and spend campaign money before she further declares herself.

This is how extraordinary a Senate race this is: The election is still 16 months away, long before most Senate candidates have even hired a press secretary, and the leading but unannounced Republican candidate, New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, is traveling the state with a scowling posse of city police officers. But that’s nothing compared to the grimacing Secret Service phalanx around the first lady--nevermind the editorial writers, the Kyoto News Service and knots of protesters at every stop holding things like pieces of carpet in the shape of Arkansas.

Now back to the hayfield.

Ginny Van Horn and several other ordinary citizens who sought out the curiosity of this “historic day,” as they repeatedly described it, said they were struck that, however much she tried, the first lady is, well, the first lady.

“She’s so polished and composed, but there’s a certain amount of acting that goes on in the political world,” said Van Horn, who lives down the road from the Moynihans. A Democrat in this largely Republican area, Van Horn said she was duly impressed by the spectacle and by the first lady’s “poise.” But the 48-year-old financial analyst said the best she could do was withhold judgment.

“I’m not ready to judge her yet,” she said. “I judge people by their actions. Integrity means a whole lot to me. I’ll give her a chance.”

Moynihan, for his part, helped Clinton navigate this new world. After she first called on a Washington-based TV reporter, Moynihan stepped in to save her from the faux pas, directing her attention to Gabe Pressman, the dean of the New York press corps.

After the hayfield, the Moynihans offered Clinton a brunch of quiche, ham and biscuits in the farmhouse. But first she took a phone call. The president had interrupted his poverty tour to check in on her one-hour-old venture.

Later, at a “listening” event of educators at a local college, she mentioned the president’s call from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. “I could hear the drums in the background,” she said, laughing. She praised her husband’s ability to deflect critics, which she said she hopes to adopt if elected.

“One of my husband’s great contributions is he keeps going,” she said. “I think that’s the way for leaders to lead.”

As the day wore on, however, the differences between the Clintons’ campaign styles began to surface. At lunch at the best barbecue joint in the county, for example, instead of gnawing the chicken to the bone, as her husband surely would have, she had iced tea and a salad.

But the first lady also showed she’s picked up a thing or two in her 25 years of marriage. At the Soccer Hall of Fame, a new $8-million facility in Oneonta, she threw her arms around six female soccer players, ages 19 to 31, for a group photo after they presented her with a red soccer jersey and a silver stadium coffee cup, and she revealed that she played goalie on her junior high school soccer team.

“She seems like a down-to-earth person,” said soccer player Beth Kutler, a nurse practioner at the local college. “Like a soccer mom.”

But there was no mistaking the Clintonian ability to recognize acronyms and sling wonk slang with the best of them. During the listening session at the Oneonta campus of the State University of New York, she took notes as she displayed, rapid-fire, all her new knowledge of New York. It was as if she forgot about the campaign thing for a moment and reverted to her first lady role.

“I think a lot of people would be surprised that if upstate New York were a state it would rank 49th in job creation,” she mentioned ever-so-casually.

It was certainly no accident that the cosmopolitan first lady/candidate began her tour in upstate New York, a Republican-dominated area that typically produces 45% of the votes in statewide elections. This was an opportunity not only to listen but also to reach out.

So when state Assemblyman William Magee, a Democrat, mentioned he wanted to talk agriculture, a pressing upstate concern, with the first lady, she asked him if he wanted to say something then.

“Yes,” Magee said, “But another day, another visit.”