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And so in the months before the November 2010 special election to serve out the remainder of Clinton's term, Gillibrand's positions evolved. Quickly. She became a supporter of the Dream Act, which grants citizenship to undocumented children who've grown up in the U.S. And she moved left on gun control; an NRA spokesman said it was the quickest flip from "an A to an F rating I've ever witnessed." Her staff says the change was inevitable given that she had gone from representing a small, rural, mostly white district to a hugely multicultural state plagued in many urban areas by gun violence. Still, those reversals were done at such high speeds that Chuck Schumer, the senior Senator from New York, reportedly told her to take it down a notch. Schumer now says he only encouraged her "to fight back against attacks when at first she was hesitant," he tells TIME.
Once in the Senate, Gillibrand showed similar nerve. She helped force through the repeal of "Don't ask, don't tell," which hadn't seen action on the Senate floor in nearly 20 years, overcoming a filibuster by such GOP stalwarts as John McCain. The 9/11 Health and Compensation Act had been languishing in the Senate for a decade when she began marching victims through Senators' offices, pleading for relief. The STOCK Act, which barred congressional staff from giving investors and "researchers" insider tips about the direction various bills might be going, went against her donor base on Wall Street. None of these measures would have stood much chance of passage in the past 10 years, but Gillibrand found ways to pick the lock on each, often despite the opposition of Democratic leaders. "Can you do this stuff without pissing [the leadership] off so much so they basically see you as nothing but a gadfly?" asks Norman Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. "Or can you do it in a way that, even though it creates headaches, they understand you're doing it for appropriate reasons? My sense is Gillibrand's in the latter group."
She has an understudy's gift for role models: she is effusive about her predecessor Clinton, while Schumer has shown her how Empire State Senators will always have a ready supply of cash--if they know how to deploy it. Since 2009, Gillibrand has raised more than $31 million, mostly from donors on Wall Street, much of which she's given away to colleagues and political committees. That's a huge amount for a Senator who has yet to serve a full term, and Gillibrand has found that the money helps buy goodwill and willing ears when she has a pet issue. It also makes her popular with new candidates and those facing re-election.
In Fighting Trim
Gillibrand, who turns 47 on Dec. 9, has two children under 11 and is a Senate anomaly in other ways as well. She once chased Tim Scott, a South Carolina Republican, into the GOP cloakroom trying to win his vote. (Gillibrand came up short, but the gambit raised eyebrows.) Such efforts help explain why even her rivals give her points for energy and may be a reason Gillibrand has lost 40 lb. while serving in the slow-moving upper chamber. (A high-jog, low-carb regimen, carefully documented in Self magazine, did the rest, she says.)