IT'S GOT TO BE BUTT-BOY
Mark Steyn on why he believes that
the unknown Rick Lazio can beat Hillary Clinton in New York
IT was supposed to be Godzilla v. King Kong. But then King Kong announced that he was separating from Queen Kong, and Queen Kong revealed that she'd accepted the leading role in a play called The Vagina Monologues. Very little is required of a Republican spouse these days, but eschew- ing any appearance in an entertainment with 'vagina' in the title is surely the least one could ask. So now Rudy Giuliani, the most successful mayor in New York history, is himself history, buried under an accumu- lation of distractions. While his soon-to-be ex, Donna Hanover, was auditioning for The Vagina Monologues, Rudy, it seems, saw himself as the star of Run For Your Wife or When Did You Last See Your Trousers?
With the Mayor's departure, America's most closely watched Senate race now has a far more satisfying New York narrative: the plucky understudy. 'You're going out there a youngster, but you've got to come back a star!' as Warner Baxter tells the moon- faced Ruby Keeler in 42nd Street. The moon-faced youngster in this case is hang on a minute, I have to cross the room to look him up in Who's Not Who — ah, yes, young Rick Lazio. Rick Lazio? Isn't he the busboy at Denny's up on Route 118? Well, no; apparently he's a member of Congress. As in the current box-office smash Gladiator, he'll be outperforming expectations if he survives till Tuesday.
He is up against the lumbering behemoth waddling across the Empire State and crushing every midget Republican between her terrifying ankles. Little Ricky set about his task by launching his campaign at the gym of his Alma Mater, West Islip High School on Long Island, and thereby subtly underlining the difference between him and his opponent: Hillary Rodham Clinton was unable to launch her Senate campaign at her old high school, because it's in a differ- ent time zone. But then Congressman Wos- sisnamo dropped the subtleties. 'You can tell from my accent that I am a lifelong New Yorker,' he said. 'I've never needed an exploratory committee to help me figure out where I wanted to live.'
Somewhere upstate, Mrs Clinton deplored this descent into 'negative cam- paigning': was a little disappointed,' she said, 'that my latest opponent has already started hurling insults instead of offering ideas about what we can do to improve the lives of New Yorkers.' A nice touch, that `latest opponent' bit. Her spokesman Howard Wolfson was also offended. 'I'm shocked by the approach they are taking,' he said. 'They are so overwhelmed by their hatred for her. I guess you have to run a negative campaign when you're a Gingrich Republican with a record that's too extreme for New York.' Veteran Hillary sidekick Harold Ickes used the most damning word in the Democrat lexicon: Congressman Lazio was 'mean-spirited'.
Good thing these Democrats aren't mean-spirited. On MSNBC, the former Clinton White House aide Paul Begala described Lazio as 'a total butt-boy for Gingrich the whole time he was in the Congress'. Given the Clinton administra- tion's commitment to 'helping our gay and lesbian friends take their place at the American table' (as Al Gore puts it), calling someone 'a total butt-boy' is presumably a compliment. After all, Mr Begala couldn't be indulging in crude homophobic stereo- typing, could he? The esteemed conserva- tive commentator Ramesh Ponnuru spent Monday dialling round the gay-activist crowd trying to discern current liberal eti- quette on Mr Begala's robust epithet. 'It could be a kissing reference,' said the spokesgay of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Hmm. I happen to think that Paul Begala has spent the last two years being used by the President as 'a total butt- boy' over the Monica business. But I'd be reluctant to say so on television, even on an obscure cable channel such as MSNBC, for fear of being tagged as 'mean-spirited'.
Anyway, Gingrich is ancient history. The `Newt's back!' rhetoric is a measure of the Clinton team's desperation faced with a candidate whose ideology is a blur: he boasts about his efforts to stop Bill Clinton cutting welfare, which doesn't sound terri- bly Newtesque. Months ago, Mike Long, the chairman of New York's Conservative party, charac- terised Hillary and Rudy as two leaning towers, propping each other up. It was a question of whether more people hated Hillary enough to vote for Rudy than hated Rudy enough to vote for Hillary. Years back, I was stopped on the street by a pollster and asked whom I wanted to win the Iran–Iraq War: a) Iran b) Iraq c) Neither of the Above Option (c) is what this campaign's been in need of. And now Congressman Neither of the Above is here to save the day. For the First Lady, he's a slippery target. He has zero name-recognition, but in New York that's a plus: chances are, if they recognise your name, they already hate you. That's why Hillary's been running a no-publicity campaign, spending her time in cow country upstate. The other day she was in Troy, a dreary, decayed town. 'I am here tonight,' said Hilary, 'because, as noble and rich as our past is, along with all of you I believe that New York's future can be even better if we work hard to make it so.'
Downstate, meanwhile, the most vicious operatives in US politics are desperately trawling Little Ricky's garbage in search of anything they can use. Hillary of Troy is still the face that launched a thousand shits, sending them out to search and destroy. In 1992, she even managed to claim as a feder- al election expense the cost of the private investigators hired to dig up dirt on Bill's opponents. 'What does it take for a Clin- ton to lose?' wailed a despairing Republi- can last week. On the face of it, the total meltdown of the savviest politician in the state is, to say the least, suspicious. The New York press had known that Mayor G. mliani and Ms (Don't Call Me Mrs Giu- liani) Hanover had led 'separate lives' for seque time, yet chose to ignore it. But then someone leaked to the New York Post the name of a restaurant regularly patronised by Rudy and Judi, his 'friend'. Dick Mor- ris, the Clinton confidant who fell out with the White House after he went on a Cali- fornia radio station and justified the tryst with Monica by implying that the First Lady was a lesbian, now claims that some- °De on Hillary's team slipped the Post a tip because — if you can follow this — in the wake of the Mayor's announcement that ,he had prostate cancer, the hatchet-faced Dastard was suddenly Mister Sympathetic and the Clinton campaign didn't know how to deal with it. In the new Clintonised poli- tics, the public doesn't care much about adultery, but, according to the conspiracy tsrists, Hillary lcnew that Rudy cared. he cunningly foresaw that, already sideswiped by cancer, he could be pro- pelled by the adultery revelations into rash public decisions to dump his wife, follow his heart, etc. An alternative view is that the Clinton team cannily capitalised on the fact that the Mayor was temporarily unhinged by his cancer medication.
Possibly. But it's awfully reminiscent of the theory that 'a vast right-wing conspir- acy' had 'entrapped' the President into lowering his pants to Monica. It's certainly the case that Rudy's gone nuts. While it may be admirable for a prominent Italian- American to disdain so much of that tire- some ethnic stereotyping — family, loyalty, Catholicism, pasta — the most scrutinised Senate race ever is probably not the place to do it. Well, okay, maybe he still likes pasta, but right now I'm pasta caring. In his press conference to announce the end of his campaign, Rudy used the word 'love' 18 times. Terrific. But next time fall in love in a non-election year. When a Senate can- didate lets the moon hit his eye like a big pizza pie, that's a moron. But I don't think Hillary did him in. He's always been a loner. He endorsed clapped- out Democrat governor Mario Cuomo over fellow Republican George Pataki. And, in agreeing to support him as the Senate nom- inee, Pataki and co. were going against all their best instincts. They were betting that Giuliani could be the first New York Republican since 1974 to win without the endorsement of the small but important Conservative party. (Not only was Rudy insufficiently conservative for the Conserva- tive party, he was so pro-gay and pro-abor- tion that the Liberal party preferred him to Hillary.) They were betting that he'd be the first New York City mayor to play well upstate, where Gotham slickers are regard- ed as barely less foreign than an Illinois- Arkansan who's just landed at Buffalo Airport from Washington. They were bet- ting that he could persuade his police department to cut back on shooting unarmed black men until late November. And, most of all, Pataki and co. were bet- ting that Rudy wouldn't stab 'em in the back as he did before. Wrong on all counts.
So good riddance, Rudy. The first polls of the new race showed Hillary with 46 per cent against Rick Lazio's 32 per cent. This was taken as bad news for Little Ricky. But look at it the other way: she's one of the most famous people on the planet; he's a nobody who got into the race on Satur- day. The reality of Hillary's campaign is that she's stalled in the polls, even against entirely unknown, hypothetical candidates. Against Giuliani, Lazio, Pataki, the shoeshine boy at Penn Station, the dog from Annie or a curling, sweating pastra- mi-on-rye in a midtown deli window, Hillary comes in around 45 per cent every time. She was lucky enough to draw an opponent whose negatives were as big as hers. Now she's up against a generic cookie- cutter candidate: when he enters the gym, the PA plays 'New York, New York'; the T-shirts say, '100 per cent New York!' At 42, he has a goofy kind of boyish charm. He's from the suburbs, where New York elections are decided. He is, as Pataki puts it, the man from 'Lawn Guy Land'.
Up against Lawn Guy, the famous can- didate is the one in trouble: the big shot gets the top-rank correspondents trailing them around waiting for mistakes. Last week, for example, Hillary forgot to vote in the school board election in what's sup- posed to be her 'home town', Chappaqua in Westchester County. For any other New York politician to forget to vote in a New York election would be a mistake. For a celebrity candidate who's just land- ed at LaGuardia and is still trying to shake off the carpetbagger tag, it's a lulu. And, as casual slights go, it's very reveal- ing: Hillary claims education is one of her `priorities', but to a big-government type like the First Lady that means it's some- thing to be settled by federal diktat, not by the democratically elected Chappaqua Board. Hillary would have taken consid- erable heat for that blunder if the media hadn't been preoccupied by Rudy's 'I Gotta Be Me' routine. Unless Little Ricky's working weekends as a transvestite hooker, the media are unlike- ly ever to be so preoccupied by Hillary's opponent again. Lawn Guy or butt-boy, my money's on Nick. Er, Rick.
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