NEWS ANALYSIS : Clemency Flap a Road Map to New York Ethnic Politics

Long after the furor over clemency for Puerto Rican nationalists dies down, the contretemps that enveloped President Clinton and clouded Hillary Rodham Clinton’s U.S. Senate campaign will stand as a textbook example of the nuances and pitfalls of ethnic politics in New York.

What may have started out as a bid to win support in the Latino community quickly boomeranged this week, and when the first lady abandoned her tacit support for the clemency offered by her husband to members of the FALN organization--a group whose members carried out bombings and other acts from 1974 to 1983--she got heat from activists on both sides.

Mrs. Clinton reiterated her opposition to their release Wednesday in a Long Island news conference, saying: “I stand by that statement[on clemency], yet I understand the depth of feeling in the Puerto Rican community, and I look forward to working with them on other issues that we can make a difference on.” Earlier, her likely opponent in the Senate race, New York’s Republican Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, had expressed his strong opposition to the president’s offer of clemency.

Mrs. Clinton said she did not know the prisoners were considering accepting the deal Saturday, when she called for it to be rescinded on the grounds that they had taken three weeks without responding. The first lady said there are bound to be occasions during the campaign when she will disagree with her husband. “I will express that disagreement,” she said. “That is what I intend to do.”

Clearly, Mrs. Clinton hoped to clear the air with her comments. But now, as 12 of 16 jailed Puerto Ricans prepare to walk free, political operatives wonder whether she has learned enough about the Empire State’s ethnic minefields to avoid similar flaps in the future. Indeed, these professionals say there are key lessons to be learned from the controversy:

First, politicians err in viewing any ethnic group as a homogenous bloc. Second, candidates who court votes in one community may inadvertently risk losing support in another. And courtesy counts--politicians who seek support from an ethnic group should sit down with key representatives, something Mrs. Clinton failed to do with Puerto Rican leaders when it came to her views on the clemency issue.

“Both she and the president showed remarkably poor judgment on the Puerto Rican issue,” said former New York Mayor Edward I. Koch, who continues to support her candidacy. “People told her this granting of clemency would endear her to the Hispanic population, but the issue is more complex. That’s not how things work here.”

Other Problems Waiting in the Wings

While New York is not the only state with such rivalries and complexities, its multitude of ethnic groups and media-driven landscape is more intense than most areas. And if Hillary Clinton stumbled over the Puerto Rican issue, there are other problems waiting in the wings. How, for example, will she face the thorny question of dealing with the Rev. Al Sharpton, a media-savvy, grass-roots leader among blacks who is viewed with hostility by many white ethnic voters whose support Mrs. Clinton will need? So far, Sharpton has said he expects to meet with her and she should not take black political support for granted. Meanwhile, she has held him at arm’s length, promising to run an “inclusive” Senate campaign.

Even her advisors concede she will have to be more specific at some point, and observers from both parties suggest that it takes more than a staff briefing paper to understand the fine art of ethnic political campaigning in New York. Mrs. Clinton, they suggest, needs more of a learning curve than a listening tour as she continues her exploratory campaign for the Senate race 14 months away. And it takes a fine-tuned political ear to know the difference between courting and pandering.

“You get the feeling that neither the president nor Mrs. Clinton knew that much about the Puerto Rican issue when they got into this,” said Fred Siegel, professor of urban history at Cooper Union College in New York City. “This is a city that went through the World Trade Center bombings and trials of people who wanted to blow up the subways. . . . How could people here just quietly accept the fact that terrorists would go free?”

The complexities of ethnic politics in New York are mind-boggling, and candidates often make the mistake of viewing an ethnic group as if all its members were all of a similar mind, Siegel noted. Yet not all of New York’s 1.3 million Puerto Ricans are gung-ho on the impending release of the prisoners, for example, and even though a handful of elected officials have condemned Mrs. Clinton’s apparent flip-flop on the issue, it is not clear how many people they speak for in their communities.

Ethnic Groups Have Competing Priorities

Nor is it clear how much of an impact Puerto Rican voters alone will have on a New York Senate race where other Latino groups, including Dominicans, Cubans and Mexicans, have competing priorities. Their rate of immigration is also different: While the number of Puerto Ricans has held steady here in recent years, the number of Mexicans has jumped from 55,698 in 1990 to 306,283 in 1998, according to calculations by sociologist John Mollenkopf of City University of New York.

Some observers have speculated that Mrs. Clinton reversed herself on the clemency issue as opposition to the deal grew among leading New York politicians, including Giuliani and Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, along with law enforcement groups. But the memory of her earlier acquiescence in the clemency deal, coupled with the sense that she may have been trying to have it both ways, could ultimately cost her support with other ethnic voters.

“She could pay a long-term price with Italian Americans, a much larger group of ethnic voters she can’t afford to antagonize,” said veteran political consultant Joseph Mercurio, who was worked with both Democratic and Republican candidates. Several New York police officers who were victims of FALN violence in the 1980s are Italian Americans, Mercurio explained, and they have received a great deal of TV publicity in recent weeks.

“I wonder if President Clinton and Mrs. Clinton even thought about the political repercussions this [clemency] could cause in that community,” he added.

In New York, potential pitfalls are everywhere, and even the most veteran political players can make fatal mistakes. Just ask former Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato, a master of political gamesmanship, who overplayed his hand in the Jewish community last year in a losing bid for a fourth Senate term. He lost 50% of his earlier support in that crucial group by calling his Jewish opponent, then-Rep. Charles E. Schumer, a “putzhead” and also by airing TV spots where Holocaust survivors criticized Schumer.

D’Amato’s fierce attacks struck many as ethnic pandering, and Hillary Clinton was hit with similar complaints two months ago when she abruptly broke with administration policy and endorsed Jerusalem as Israel’s “eternal” capital. “If she thought this would bring in a lot of Jewish votes, she was mistaken,” noted Mercurio, “because no community in this state is going to be galvanized around one single issue.”

Earlier, the Rev. Jesse Jackson sparked an ethnic flap when he offhandedly referred to New York City as “Hymietown,” triggering major Jewish opposition to his candidacy in the 1984 Democratic presidential primary. And former State Atty. Gen. Robert Abrams angered Italian American voters in 1992 when he referred to D’Amato as a “fascist.”

Recent polls on the New York Senate race put Clinton and Giuliani in a dead heat, and both candidates will be scrambling to maximize turnout among their core supporters. For the first lady, that means a heavy turnout among black and Latino voters in New York City. While it may occasionally be necessary for a candidate to vote against supporters, it’s a cardinal rule of New York politics that you treat voters with courtesy and respect. Amid the FALN furor, some Puerto Rican activists suggested that Mrs. Clinton may be taking their support for granted.

“Why didn’t she sit down and talk with us before she changed her position on the clemency issue?” state Assemblyman Ruben Diaz Jr., who represents the Bronx, complained Wednesday, echoing a widely held view among community leaders. “We deserved that much, and she owes us. She should tell us what happened.”