New York State Of Mine

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The Never Ending Tour's second strategic purpose is to have Clinton spend so much time in New York that she becomes part of the scenery. She's hoping this will help neutralize what she called "a very fair question," the charge that she is a carpetbagger with no ties to the state and no business running there. (She wants her novelty to wear off but not her celebrity.)

Third, by appearing modest and thirsty for the wisdom of New Yorkers--taking notes, asking questions--she hopes to erase, as much as possible, the memory of the arrogant know-it-all of 1994 who designed a 1,364-page health-care reform plan in secret sessions. At a medical center in Cooperstown, Clinton voiced her impatience with incremental health-care reform, "the school of smaller steps" she and her husband have been forced to rely on ever since; the patient's bill of rights, though she supports it, is a mere "diversion" from the real problems: greedy drug companies, miserly managed-care combines, 43 million uninsured Americans. But at the same forum she had the nerve to say that when she approaches health issues, "I'm only a patient. I'm just a lay person."

That's hokum, of course--the bit of flimflam at the core of her listening tour. Hillary knew more about health care and education than most of the panelists she was listening to last week. She displayed an extraordinary command of policy detail, a steely anger on behalf of those getting screwed by the health and education systems, a fine ear for the telling local anecdote (such as the Ithaca car-crash victim denied insurance coverage after she failed to get preapproval for her emergency helicopter evacuation because she was unconscious at the time). But she was the Woman Who Knew Too Much. When a panelist at the education forum in Oneonta talked about an early-elementary remediation program called Reading Recovery, Hillary couldn't contain herself. "I know something about this program because I've followed it and I've supported it for, I guess, more than 10 or 12 years," she began, "ever since I learned about it being pioneered in New Zealand." It was classic Hillary. Time and again she would ask some nuanced question that her panelists were unable to answer--and then she would answer it herself:

Hillary: Is the Medicaid reimbursement formula now significantly different from most managed-care reimbursement rates?

Expert: Uh, I don't know.

Hillary: Well, what I'm being told is, in some parts of the country the managed-care rate is not much better if at all better than the Medicaid rate, but there still is resistance toward [accepting] Medicaid patients.

Expert: [stunned silence]

In politics, it's not smart to seem too smart. Bill Clinton uses his intellect to dazzle audiences, but he does it in an inclusive way. He articulates things people know but can't quite express. Hillary sometimes can't help intimidating them. At a senior citizens' center in Utica, a teacher told her that the school district's resources for disabled students are spread too thin because of a federal decree that disabled students be mainstreamed, not put in special schools. Hillary corrected her. They can be mainstreamed, she said, but still concentrated in specific schools, "so you have a whole row of wheelchairs, not just one or two." The teacher hung her head. "I apologize; we do that," she said. Bill would have salved her ego. Hillary asked for another question, but for a long, silent moment, there weren't any. Her listeners didn't want to cross swords with her, and who could blame them? But when the session was over, they all came up for autographs.

The listening events also let Clinton demonstrate what she has been learning about the state's history and economy, its people and problems. Once or twice on each day of her tour, she showed off her prize stat the way a dog parades a bone: "If upstate New York were a separate state," she said, "it would rank 49th in job creation and economic development." And that's more than a stat--it's an indication of how she'll run against her probable opponent, New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

In upstate New York, it's still the economy, stupid. Since 1960 the city of Utica, for example, has lost half its population--down to 64,000 from 125,000--and much of the region has scarcely benefited from the boom of the 1990s, suggesting that the same lunch-pail issues that delivered New York to Bill in 1992 could help deliver it to Hillary in 2000. Her signature concerns--economic fairness and child welfare, education reform and affordable health care--won't carry the largely Republican upstate against Giuliani, but they could keep it close enough for her to win, since she's likely to beat him handily in his own (Democratic) hometown. The race's great unknown is who would take the New York City suburbs, where both are very popular.