Real (Weird) People: On the Hillary Trail in New York

I needn't have worried. There have only been four reporters who've stuck to Lazio through the whole summer. Except for local reporters joining the van for the day, nobody has sent correspondents on Lazio assignments. "Nobody?" I asked one of the regulars. "Nobody."

Covering Hillary even a year ago, by contrast, you'd get to meet correspondents from the sixth-largest Ukrainian network, a provincial weekly in Chile, a vegetarian newsletter in Ann Arbor and some startup webzine from the Connemara Gaeltacht. Perhaps this demand for Hillary coverage has led her campaign to think that getting to travel along is privilege enough. Not only is hers not the McCain bus, which had an open full bar on it (not to mention the actual candidate); it's not even the Lazio bus, which serves sandwiches and has a bathroom. ("Don't look for premiums or coupons, as the cost of the tobaccos blended on the Hillary Campaign prohibits the use of them.")

Reporters who cover both campaigns think the Lazio one is the more festive and comfortable, but the Clinton one is the better professional opportunity. Lazio gives you a varied menu of events, plus roast beef on rye. Hillary gives you a monotonous series of message talks and a van ride that would be uncomfortable even if the average weight of an adult male were 115 pounds. On the other hand, if Hillary says nothing more than, "Great to be here today!" your story gets in the paper.

I joined Hillary unbreakfasted at 8 in the morning, missed her van and took a $60 cab out to the Long Island school where she was speaking. Noon came, one, two, before I thought to ask one of the regulars if we got lunch. "Not usually," she said. Fortunately she had heisted a few onion bagels from a National Council of Jewish Women meeting. But that was the day's meal.

In the Lazio-Clinton race, as in all political races, the people who blow into the various events are more entertaining than the candidates themselves. There was Tom Hales, the banker at the Pearl River (Rockland County) Lazio breakfast, who described himself as "probably the greatest banker in American history." That "probably" was evidence of Mr. Hales' becoming modesty. "The problem," said Hales, "is that this surplus is revenue-driven. I don't think Greenspan understands that." "But you do..." said the Washington Post's correspondent, probably biting his lip till it bled as he did so. Then there was Bill Larkin, the state senator who represents part of Orange County. His wife's daycare class provided nine-tenths of the ethnic diversity at a Newburgh waterfront rally, but he later tried to explain that there'd been nothing premeditated about her appearance there at all.

At the same event, Matt Turnbull introduced himself to me to wave the flag for Hillary. "You feel her. She's so sincere, so real. To know her is to vote for her." Turnbull is one of those Democratic hecklers who show up at Republican events to ask annoyingly illogical questions. His first, howled at me as Lazio walked along a riverfront path, was, "Um, uh, he ah said in his debate that he's against gambling. Does that mean he wants to close bars down, too, in... uh, New York state? So people can't drink?" Had Lazio heard it, he would surely have responded: "What?" Turnbull's second question concerned John McCain. This one was shouted at Lazio staffers and supporters as they drifted behind the candidate to the bus: "How can you criticize Hillary for being a carpetbagger when John McCain is the ultimate carpetbagger? He never lived in Arizona until he ran for Senate!" For one, that's not exactly true. And besides, Lazio didn't back McCain. Still, the incident probably caused the thought to flit across a few Republican minds that this election would look very different if McCain had got the nomination.

The best "real person" (as George Bush would put it) showed up at a Hillary event?a talk with senior citizens at Hadassah Lieberman's mother's YWHA in Riverdale. This guy, who looked like he was wearing a windbreaker over a prayer shawl, lured her into a spectacular trap. He started by asking meekly what she felt about the bottleneck on prescription drug approvals. At this point, Hillary must have thought she was dealing with an AIDS activist or social worker who carried a grudge about how slowly protease inhibitors had been brought onto the market. So she came in with guns blazing, trashing the drug approval system, talking about breaking down barriers and expanding the number of trials for "alternative therapies." So the guy asked: "You include medical marijuana here, I assume?" Oh, checkmate! Hillary gave that bug-eyed look as if someone had goosed her, and you could see the thoughts running through her head as she realized her miscalculation: Oh, cripes?he's one of those guys. But it was a fair enough question, and the audience would be interested to hear her answer, right? Nope. Hillary was just beginning to sputter out an answer?which sounded like, "Well, I wouldn't go that far!"?when they began to shout the poor fellow down.

Semper Fidel The only strong general impression I formed of the upstate areas through which Lazio traveled was that they have the thickest concentration of live-nude-dancing clubs, dirty book stores and porn video outlets I've seen outside the garrison towns of Guatemala. Not to mention those red flags of depression-gripped towns: sports memorabilia shops. Why these should flourish in rotting mill towns while every hairdresser, butcher and shoe store goes under has always been something of a mystery to me. But the best explanation I've heard is that those hairdressers, butchers and shoe salesmen all have valuable baseball cards in shoeboxes in their attic. And once they get laid off and can't pay the rent, some local sharp will be happy to pay them a quarter of the market value for their collection, which he can then drive down to the city and sell. Poor Lazio last week began to take on the look of a candidate who was getting clobbered. He keeps bringing up the concept of "double taxation," which no one understands and he wouldn't explain. He also recycled the urban myth about a questionnaire that asked educators in 1940 about the biggest problems they faced in the classroom ("chewing gum, talking out of turn"). When it was repeated in 1990, the problems were "rape, assault, drug addiction and alcoholism." A touching reminder of how far our educational system has fallen. Too bad it's not true.

Still, it was hard not to admire a politician who actually sends his daughters to public schools. Not to mention a free-trader who in the wake of the Elian Gonzalez affair stands up for the Cuban embargo. Not to mention, either, a basically regular guy who seems sincerely fascinated by the industrial plants he visits. At a display of halogen lamps used to light (seriously) jewelry and fruit he walked around muttering, "This is a really soft light. I can't believe how soft it is. Very soft. This is really soft, too."

Meanwhile, not to sound like I have Kingsley Amis on the brain, but there's a passage in his letters about the gullibility of literary critics that applies equally well to political journalists, particularly those who've covered Hillary over the years: "Most reviewers take the will for the deed," Amis says. "You know that's a mighty important conception. The exquisite feminine poetic sensibility of V. Woolf, the whatever-it-was of [Henry] James and so on: it had all been brilliantly put into the critics' heads by the novelists themselves."

Nobody is less content to let the media take her as it finds her than Hillary. She's always been an education "reformer"...a healthcare "advocate"...and she cares about "children's rights," is a "tireless crusader" for them, in fact. Just take her word for it.