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How To Beat Hillary Clinton
Back before Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, and before she was beaten, she was pretty much unbeatable.
In a pair of New York Senate races in 2000 and 2006, Clinton and her sprawling network intimidated potential candidates like Rep. Nita Lowey and Mayor Rudy Giuliani out of the race, relentlessly battered the ones who made it in, and sailed to easy November victories. Reporters who covered those races (I started as a political reporter soon after the first, and covered the second) and Republicans who ran and worked on them recall to this day being surprised at times by her woodenness, her lack of policy ambition, and the cracks beneath the surface of her organization. But she was also tireless and well-prepared, and she won handily — breaking 55% in 2000, 83% in the 2006 primary, and 67% in that general election.
“You have to have your flak jacket on and be prepared to take the hits,” her 2000 challenger, Rick Lazio, told BuzzFeed News in an interview last week. “She will have an effective and ruthless campaign team and the toughest or dirtiest work will be done by operatives whose authorship will never be published — they’re going to be behind the scenes and they’ll be thorough and they’ll be as brutal as anyone who’s ever been in politics can be.”
Clinton’s entry into electoral politics felt, at first, preposterous: Rep. Charles Rangel led a faux draft to supposedly drag the divisive first lady into the Senate race in a state where she had no real connection. The Clintons muscled out a local Democrat for a clash of the titans — Hillary vs. Rudy! — only to have Giuliani pull out as his own personal and public life got messy. Her political transformation was just as stunning. By 2006, she was an uncontroversial, moderate, and hard-working incumbent with a reputation for bipartisanship who had spent real time in Rochester.
In a pair of New York Senate races in 2000 and 2006, Clinton and her sprawling network intimidated potential candidates like Rep. Nita Lowey and Mayor Rudy Giuliani out of the race, relentlessly battered the ones who made it in, and sailed to easy November victories. Reporters who covered those races (I started as a political reporter soon after the first, and covered the second) and Republicans who ran and worked on them recall to this day being surprised at times by her woodenness, her lack of policy ambition, and the cracks beneath the surface of her organization. But she was also tireless and well-prepared, and she won handily — breaking 55% in 2000, 83% in the 2006 primary, and 67% in that general election.
“You have to have your flak jacket on and be prepared to take the hits,” her 2000 challenger, Rick Lazio, told BuzzFeed News in an interview last week. “She will have an effective and ruthless campaign team and the toughest or dirtiest work will be done by operatives whose authorship will never be published — they’re going to be behind the scenes and they’ll be thorough and they’ll be as brutal as anyone who’s ever been in politics can be.”
Clinton’s entry into electoral politics felt, at first, preposterous: Rep. Charles Rangel led a faux draft to supposedly drag the divisive first lady into the Senate race in a state where she had no real connection. The Clintons muscled out a local Democrat for a clash of the titans — Hillary vs. Rudy! — only to have Giuliani pull out as his own personal and public life got messy. Her political transformation was just as stunning. By 2006, she was an uncontroversial, moderate, and hard-working incumbent with a reputation for bipartisanship who had spent real time in Rochester.
Here is the list, warning it is Buzzfeed and it reads a bit like a hit piece.
1 replies
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Fabulous. Just makes me so proud.
