In New York, He’s Playing Second Fiddle to First Lady

As far as New Yorkers were concerned, the White House sent the wrong Clinton to visit on Wednesday.

Ever since she announced in February that she was eyeing a race for the U.S. Senate here, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton has been mobbed by curious voters and hungry photographers every time she sets foot in New York.

Clinton, in his seventh year as president and commander in chief of the armed forces, proved less of a draw.

There was one lonely photographer awaiting his arrival at John F. Kennedy International Airport aboard Air Force One.

He had planned to stay in town long enough to attend a fund-raising dinner to help Geraldine A. Ferraro, the Democrats’ 1984 vice presidential candidate, pay off debts from her race for the party’s 1998 Senate nomination. But the $1,000-a-person party was canceled for lack of interest.

To be sure, there were crowds gathered Wednesday along 34th Street, a major cross-town thoroughfare in midtown Manhattan. But that’s what happens when the police set up their blue wooden barricades before a motorcade crawls through at lunchtime.

Even on the sidewalk alongside the Empire State Building, top tourist territory, pedestrians paid little heed, hurrying along while the president drove by.

Clinton joked that there is little distance in political office between dogcatcher and president and one of the events that drew him to New York was normally reserved for mayors: a ribbon cutting without the ribbon, the unveiling of an architectural model for a public building.

So there he was in the main New York City post office, the James O. Farley Building, across Eighth Avenue from Madison Square Garden. To be exact, he was in the basement--dark corners, exposed heating vents and all--marveling over plans to turn the postal facility into a new Pennsylvania Station, Amtrak’s New York terminus and a major stop in the New York City subway system.

The president was also drawn to the city by the sort of attraction that takes him to most other destinations these days--the challenge of getting Democrats to open their wallets one more time, in this case for a $10,000-a-person luncheon of cold tomato soup, bass with risotto, lamb stew and meringue with fresh berries.