Giuliani, Clinton and the Senate race that wasn't

by Frank James

Political reporter Adam Nagourney has an interesting retrospective in today's New York Times on the race that never was, the widely anticipated but aborted Year 2000 contest for a Senate seat from New York between then First Lady Hillary Clinton and New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

The premise for the story is that, if the electoral stars align just right in Iowa, New Hampshire and a spate of states on Feb. 5, these two could face off in 2008 and political junkies will finally have the contest they were denied when Giuliani withdrew from the 2000 Senate race, mainly because he didn't have the fire in the belly to be in the Senate.

After being chief executive of a city of eight million souls, being one of 100 in a deliberative body didn't appeal to Giuliani, Nagorney makes clear. It sounds like Giuliani was, for the most part, just going through the motions, not even talking much about federal issues in a race for a federal office.

An aspect missing from the story however is that there was a very real sense during that 2000 campaign that Sen. Clinton's belly fire of ambition raged beyond the Senate all the way to the White House. Many believed she didn't see her political future ending in that deliberative body of 100 either.

There was the strong suspicion that for Clinton the New York Senate race was just a way station for the most glittering of all the political prizes, the White House.

There was this from a June 14, 2000 op-ed piece written by Ross Baker, the well-known Rutgers University political scientist:

To hear Rep. Rick Lazio tell it, voting for Democratic Senate nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton should be likened to casting a ballot for an undocumented immigrant or an extraterrestrial.

The Republican Senate nominee has breathed new life into the argument that Clinton is just dropping by the State of New York on her way to the White House, and real New Yorkers should spurn her advances in favor of a guy who dug his youthful toes into the sands of Great South Bay.

Then there's this from a Nov. 29, 2000 Steve Neal column in the Chicago Sun-Times:

Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2004?

The senator-elect from New York, who is moving out of the White House, is hoping to return as the first woman president of the United States. It's not so wild a dream. As the rising star of national Democratic politics, she is in a strong position to win her party's nomination.

Even though she has vowed to serve out her six-year senatorial term, New York voters won't hold her to that pledge. Robert F. Kennedy sought the presidency four years after his election to the senatorial seat that Clinton will soon be sitting in. There's no doubt that her eyes are on the prize.

Neal was right in terms of the big picture though he was off by four years in terms of timing.

If anything, there's an irony in all this. Because Giuliani was mayor of the nation's largest city, he didn't need the Senate to establish his credibility as an eventual White House candidate, which was only enhanced in the eyes of many by his 9/11 performance.

Meanwhile, Clinton desperately needed to win the Senate to give her presidential aspirations some street cred. So in a way it can be argued that the striking thing about that 2000 race was that both Giuliani and Clinton were, in their own ways, looking beyond the Senate.