Hillarysworld

Read @ Vogue.com

In Hillary’s Footsteps:
Kirsten Gillibrand

by Jonathan Van Meter

U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a petite woman with pale-blue eyes and perfectly coiffed blonde hair, is sitting at a long table in a huge barn on a farm in upstate New York. There are great sacks of onions piled up to the ceiling on pallets and a few pieces of hulking equipment used during the harvest. It’s a safe bet that this barn has been spiffed up for the senator’s visit, a very special occasion for the family that lives here. It is one of those intoxicating August afternoons—cool and dry with a gentle breeze and big puffy white clouds set against a brilliant blue sky so perfect it seems fake.

This kind of event, when staged by a different sort of politician, one less finely attuned to small-town attitudes, could strike a casual observer as too perfect to be real. But Gillibrand is nothing if not genuine, and through sheer force of personality she bends the occasion to suit her style, which is essentially folksy and earnest. She radiates kindness. But she is also direct and no-nonsense. Despite the fact that she is a Democrat (and a fairly progressive one, at that) and worked for fifteen years as a hotshot Manhattan lawyer, she seems utterly at ease among this crowd of mostly Republican farmers, with their rough hands and weathered faces. Indeed, when she arrived moments earlier—in a plain-Jane beige linen suit and flat shoes—she walked around the room and introduced herself to everyone, including the children, shaking hands and looking everyone directly in the eyes: “Thank you for coming out today.”

She tells the farmers that her goal is to understand their worries and concerns so that she can begin to create a list of New York State’s specific priorities for the farm bill, which will be written in 2012, as it is every five years. They will do most of the talking, she tells them. She is here to listen. And talk they do, with surprising intensity and an impressive fluency in the legislative language of Washington, D.C. Gillibrand studiously takes notes while the farmers talk for nearly an hour—about immigration policy, land conservation, the estate tax, the price of milk. When she does speak, she displays a dazzling mastery of arcane agricultural policy (Gillibrand is the first senator from New York to be on the Senate Agriculture Committee in nearly 40 years). In fact, when she is introduced by Chris Pawelski, the man who owns this farm, he says, “Often when you deal with a member of the Senate, you have to explain the issues in very simple terms. But the senator had an immediate grasp of complex issues; we were able to talk to her in technical terms. Her appointment to fill the rest of Secretary of State Clinton’s term was the best possible choice for farmers in this state.” After an enthusiastic round of applause, Pawelski says, “One final point: We were born one day apart. She is one day older than me.” After a beat, Gillibrand leans into her mic and deadpans, “You will be doing what you’re told,” and everyone laughs.

As the crowd files out of the barn, I express admiration to one of the senator’s aides for his boss’s ability to charm a roomful of Republicans, and he says, “She can do the same thing on derivatives, comfortably rapping about financial markets. She walks into these huge churches in Brooklyn and Queens and starts talking about the asthma rates and the environmental-justice movement. It’s just her comfort level with so many subjects.” This reminds me of something Tina Brown, the editor in chief of The Daily Beast, told me: “People underestimate how smart Senator Gillibrand is. I hosted a dinner for her to meet a number of CEOs and media figures, and in conversation she was brilliant in her analysis of the economic meltdown. And she is an amazing fund-raiser . . . an unstoppable machine when she works the room.”

Doesn’t this all sound strangely familiar? Think back to when Hillary Clinton ran for this very same seat in the Senate ten years ago. The idea was originally met with suspicion, if not downright hostility—and Clinton disarmed a lot of folks with a “listening tour” of upstate New York, patiently visiting every county across the state. She won that election by a comfortable ten-point margin and then put her head down and got to work, charming many of her Senate colleagues on the other side of the aisle with her intelligence, her tirelessness, and her deft ability to work the center of American politics. Six years later, she was reelected in a landslide.

[SNIP]

[snip] Indeed, she herself once described her Congressional voting record as “one of the most conservative in the state.” Who was this hick from upstate?

Gillibrand was further burdened by the controversy around her appointment. [snip] “She was tossed right into that maelstrom, but she handled it the way she has done a lot of things in her career and, from what I gather, in her life: She said, ‘I’m going to try to wear people down by being a good senator and a good person.’ She’s basically outlasted her critics. She’s very Hillaryesque in that regard, in that a lot of the criticism of her at the outset was not so much about her but about what she represented to people through different lenses.”

And, like Clinton, she has since earned the respect of many of her colleagues.

Continues . . .

Full article @ Vogue.com

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She very much reminds me of Hillary. She has tremendous listening skills and is a voracious learner. She is a terrific debator, very engaging in her dialog. 

And she was one of the most loyal supporters of Hillary in 2008.  Their office was a pleasure to call during the campaign days, well into the summer.

Let us never forget that it takes a lot to overcome a "Kennedy kid" who has strong support of the WH no less to get to where she has gotten.. and she has done that with her proven experience, demonstrated capability, tremendous in-person and stage presence, and her intense loyalty.  Very Hillaryesque. 


-- Edited by Sanders on Wednesday 20th of October 2010 02:21:30 AM

typo corrected

-- Edited by Sanders on Wednesday 20th of October 2010 06:39:53 PM