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HenchPAC NewsNEW YORK -- Some 1,700 Bronx Democrats who paid $300 each for a corned beef buffet at their annual county organization dinner last Wednesday night seemed more interested in having a good time than listening to their celebrity keynote speaker. "It's another quiet night with these quiet and reserved Bronx Democrats," Hillary Rodham Clinton began. She neither evoked laughter nor quieted the boisterous crowd.
The elegant first lady could hardly have been comfortable at the Marina Del Ray banquet hall, and she did not stick around for long after her 12-minute speech. But the Bronx, once Jewish and Irish but now dominated by Puerto Ricans and African-Americans, is America's most solidly Democratic county. She desperately needs an immense turnout of minority voters if she is to be elected to the Senate in November. Her reception at Wednesday night's dinner indicated she cannot take that support for granted.
Mrs. Clinton's situation is difficult. The polls show her statewide support stuck somewhere between 41 and 45 percent, whether against the universally recognized Mayor Rudolph Giuliani or the hardly known Rep. Rick Lazio. "This election is going to be about issues," she replied Tuesday when asked about Lazio in a rare, brief encounter with reporters. She is wrong. The election is all about her as a polarizing, newly minted New Yorker, and she is in trouble.
Democratic politicians here (including, according to sources, loyal friend-of-the-Clintons Harold Ickes) complain that over the past year she has not yet defined her candidacy. They feel that pollster Mark Penn's technique of compartmentalizing constituencies and issues, which worked so well for Bill Clinton nationally is failing his wife in New York.
The cover of the thick, advertisement-laden program for the Bronx County dinner features an earlier Senate interloper: Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, whose 1964 victory here is Mrs. Clinton's model. Covering Kennedy, I wrote in this column 36 years ago that he was "attracting crowds whose size and nearly hysterical enthusiasm surpass anything seen even in presidential campaigns." Hillary is no Bobby. It is hard to imagine him unable to command silence from a Democratic audience.
When I wandered among the party faithful at Marina Del Ray asking about their candidate, the usual response was a shrug and a vague assurance that "she'll be all right." Many seemed much more interested in the machinations of Bronx County Chairman Roberto Ramirez, who is playing the role of a New York boss in the old tradition.
Ramirez's major venture for 2000 is purging Rep. Eliot Engel, who is Jewish and a passionate supporter of Israel, in the September Democratic primary and replacing him with State Sen. Ted Seabrook, who is African-American. Bronx Congressman Engel was a non-person at Wednesday's dinner, his name never mentioned and absent from the program. Mrs. Clinton, an outsider and an innocent, had blundered into attending an Engel fund-raiser before she realized what Ramirez was up to. She made amends by attending the county dinner, then hurrying away for a hastily scheduled event at a Brooklyn synagogue.
Her brief speech at the dinner sounded more appropriate for a county chairwoman than a Senate candidate and suggested her need for a workable standard speech. "There is a lot at stake in this election," she said, warning of going back "to the days of deficits and disinvestments."
A day earlier, she attended after-school classes at St. Ann's Episcopal Church in the South Bronx with author Jonathan Kozol -- listening more than talking. Local activists complained she could have better used her time by exploring deplorable conditions in the neighborhood's public housing.
Lacking a fully formed candidate, the Clinton campaign seems determined to transform so classic a middle-roader as Lazio in a polarizing candidate of the right. Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer, Ramirez's candidate for mayor next year, in introducing the first lady referred to Lazio as "Newt Gingrich with a smile."
In the end, nothing less than Al Gore's coattails may suffice for Hillary Clinton to become a senator. Even the charismatic Bobby Kennedy required a Lyndon Johnson landslide to win. The first lady may need a one million vote Democratic presidential plurality in New York. She has to go a very long way to win it on her own.
HENCH adds: She ain't gonna run for Senate folks, mark my words. Who do you think leaked the Justice Dept. info on Gore's fundraising? Hillary is just waiting for Gore to be pummeled enough that SHE can take the DemonRat nomination for President. She actually believes she's EARNED it!
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