RUDY Giuliani’s withdrawal from the U.S. Senate race has created both opportunities and problems for Hillary Rodham Clinton. Opportunities: She no longer faces the strongest possible opponent. Problems: With Giuliani’s record off the table, that means the first lady is the main campaign issue.
And that doubtless means an even sharper focus on the nagging question of her carpetbagger status. It’s the issue that has changed little since she first considered running: A Marist College poll in late March showed that 50 percent of those surveyed said they were “concerned” about the fact that Hillary isn’t from New York – with 31 percent “greatly” bothered.
As one upstate Democratic leader told The Post’s Gregg Birnbaum recently: “It’s an issue that’s not going away, and that surprises me.”
Actually, it shouldn’t. Though the first lady is reportedly studying how the late Bobby Kennedy handled the issue when he ran for the same seat in 1964, that may not be such a good guide. Yes, Kennedy won by a comfortable margin. But the fact is, the carpetbagger issue nearly sank him.
Only the fact that he was a Kennedy running less than a year after his brother’s assassination, and the fact that Lyndon Johnson was winning 67 percent of the New York vote against Barry Goldwater, ensured RFK’s victory.
In the end, Kennedy garnered a million fewer votes than did Johnson. And where LBJ’s margin over Goldwater in the state was 2.7 million, Kennedy defeated Republican Sen. Kenneth Keating by just 700,000 votes.
On a recent segment of NBC News, Gabe Pressman – dean of the local TV news corps – was asked about his recollections of the carpetbagger question. It wasn’t an issue at all, Pressman maintained, “New Yorkers were honored to have him run here.”
Not quite, Gabe. A look back shows that the carpetbagger issue plagued Kennedy throughout the campaign. It was the single basis on which many newspapers, including the Times, endorsed his opponent.
Nor did it help when, declining early on to run, Kennedy declared: “All things being equal, it would be better for a citizen of New York to run for the position.”
And those who think that Rick Lazio has entered the race too late to win may be astonished to learn that Kennedy didn’t declare his candidacy until Aug. 16 – and wasn’t formally nominated until the beginning of September. In fact, he registered to vote so late that he wasn’t even able to cast a ballot for himself in November.
And there was no denying RFK’s dubious connections to New York, although he’d actually lived with his family in The Bronx for several years as a youngster. A resident of Virginia at the time he declared, Kennedy was registered to vote in Massachusetts – indeed, he was even slated to be a Massachusetts delegate to the Democratic convention.
Originally tempted by the idea of running, Kennedy backed out twice, hoping LBJ would pick him for the national ticket. When Johnson decided otherwise, Kennedy leaped back into the Senate race.
Kennedy was hit with many of the same charges being leveled at Clinton: That he was a stranger to New York, trading on his family name and interested in the seat only as a stepping stone to the presidency.
Unlike Hillary, he and his opponent generally agreed on the issues – so, like Mrs. Clinton, he tried to paint his opponent, a Rockefeller-Javits liberal, as a Goldwater conservative. Few voters were convinced – especially since the fledgling Conservative Party was fielding its own candidate, who ended up winning 3 percent of the vote.
There’s no doubt that Kennedy became an effective campaigner – but recognized that the excited crowds that greeted him were attracted more by the Kennedy part of his name than the Bobby. “It’s for him, it’s for him,” he said repeatedly, referring to his slain brother.
“Around him is the aura of the fallen leader,” wrote columnist Marquis Childs. “The crowds see him as the devoted brother who stood in dedicated service at the side of the late president.” That was a powerful factor. Aided by the Johnson landslide, it made Kennedy’s victory inevitable. But the relative slimness of his margin – he won just 53 percent of the vote, compared to more than 67 percent for Johnson – suggests strongly that in any other year, Kennedy’s electoral career might have been stillborn.
So what are the lessons for Hillary? Yes, Bill Clinton remains popular here, but Al Gore is not going to carry the state by 2-to-1. Nor does her name carry with it the emotional trappings of a beloved martyr’s grieving followers.
What’s left is someone who, for reasons of convenience, hand-picked New York as the launching pad for a personal political career that has long-range ambitions. And that’s something that leaves many voters suspicious.
Nineteen sixty-four was Bobby Kennedy’s year, for a multitude of reasons. But his ability to overcome the carpetbagger label wasn’t one of them.
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