Little Ricky Gets Rough

  • It was the perfect setting for a photo-op: a second-grade classroom in Rochester, N.Y., with back-to-school art on the walls, crisp uniforms on the children and a big grin on the puppy-dog face of Rick Lazio, the Republican Congressman who's running for the Senate against Hillary Rodham Clinton. But reality has a way of intruding, as Lazio discovered when a little girl looked up at him and said, "I watched you on NBC last night--why were you fighting with Mrs. Clinton?"

    As the precocious seven-year-old noticed, the Clinton-Lazio debate in Buffalo last Wednesday was a nasty piece of business, with Clinton portraying Lazio as Newt Gingrich's house elf and Lazio assailing Hillary's character and trustworthiness at every turn. But Lazio just laughed off the child's question and said, "We were talking about our different ideas."

    Any teacher would give that answer an Incomplete. Most of the fighting in Buffalo was not about ideas; it was about tactics. Clinton bashed Lazio's voting record in an attempt to show he's a right-wing hack (in truth, he's more of a split-the-difference guy; his tax-cut plan, for instance, is smaller than George W. Bush's but bigger than Al Gore's). And since Hillary doesn't have a voting record, Lazio just bashed her. It was his chance to get back into a race that was in danger of slipping away from him.

    When he declared his candidacy in May, after New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani bowed out, the little-known Lazio was immediately tied with Clinton in the polls. But in September, as Al Gore's campaign took off, Clinton crept into the lead, and some reporters who follow Lazio took to calling him the Incredible Shrinking Candidate. He has a lot in common with Bush. Both men have been trying to shake the idea that they are too slight for the jobs they seek. Both hope that attacking their opponents' character will propel them to victory. And both have stumbled into autumn. Lazio has been criticized by Republicans for a soft, lackadaisical campaign--more a lope than a run. He took a four-day vacation just as the race was heating up, had little to say about policy until recently, and favored short, almost content-free events; behind the scenes, he raised so much money that he now has more cash on hand than Clinton. Some of his attacks boomeranged: his campaign assailed Hillary for kissing the wife of Yasser Arafat, then seemed flummoxed when the White House released a photo of Lazio gripping and grinning with Arafat himself. Of such silly exchanges--You kissed her cheek! You shook his hand!--are New York elections made.

    Lazio changed the subject in Buffalo. Early on, after Clinton offered a lame defense of her disastrous 1994 health-care-reform plan, Lazio scored by saying that "a New Yorker would never have made that proposal," neatly tying her health-care problem to her carpetbagger problem. He had a nice line ready for her attempts to yoke him to Gingrich--"Mrs. Clinton, you of all people shouldn't try to make guilt by association"--but delivered it like a dinner-theater Hamlet, all portent and no grace. Then his aggressive stage direction got the best of him, and he went in for some guilt-by-association of his own.

    The moment came after moderator Tim Russert played some stomach-churning footage from the Lewinsky scandal, when Hillary vouched for her husband's fidelity on the Today show. "Do you regret misleading the American people?" Russert asked, and for a full minute she groped for a response, shaking her head, grimacing and fumbling for words that didn't add up to much. ("We had concluded Russert wouldn't do something like that," says a Hillary adviser. "She was on her own.") Then Clinton gathered herself and answered the question. "Obviously, I didn't mislead anyone," she said. "I didn't know the truth. And there's a great deal of pain associated with that, and my husband has...made it clear that he did mislead the country as well as his family." She couldn't help finishing with a dig at Lazio. "You mentioned trust," she said. "I'm standing here running for the Senate. I didn't cast the votes that Newt Gingrich asked me to cast."

    It was classic Hillary: a dignified attempt to reveal what's underneath the armor followed by a wave of her sword. When it came time for Lazio's response, he could have won some hearts by saying, "Let's move on." Instead, he kicked her hard. "What's so troubling," he said, "is that somehow it only matters what you say when you get caught. And character and trust is about, well, more than that. And blaming others every time you have responsibility? Unfortunately, that's become a pattern, I think, for my opponent."

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