When Hillary Clinton ended her presidential campaign on June 8, 2008, she uttered these now famous words: “Although we weren’t able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it’s got about eighteen million cracks in it. And the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time.”
While the line drew wild applause from the crowd who had gathered at the National Building Museum to see Clinton formally call it quits, a look behind the rhetorical curtain didn’t provide much optimism for those hoping to see a female president in their lifetimes.
Clinton was one of sixteen women in the Senate at the time; only one—North Carolina Republican senator Elizabeth Dole—had run for president before. (None have run since.) There were eight women governors; with the exception of Alaska’s own Sarah Palin none of them had appeared before, or has since, on a national ticket.
While women had made rapid progress in terms of expanding their ranks in Congress—and at the gubernatorial level—there were very few females in the political pipeline who were regarded as national candidate material. Clinton had been the great female hope for as long as anyone could remember. From her pre-Bill days—she appeared in Life magazine after delivering the commencement address at Wellesley—through her time as first lady and, especially, once she was elected to the Senate in 2000, there was little doubt in the mind of anyone—male or female—that if a woman was going to be elected president, Hillary was the one.
Then she lost. At that moment, few people would have picked Kirsten Gillibrand as the person who might pick up the presidential standard that Clinton put down that day. But those people don’t know Gillibrand’s history very well. Gillibrand traces her interest (and success) in politics to three women. “Women matter and they often can put partisan politics aside,” said Gillibrand. “They are better at getting things done.”
The first woman Gillibrand credits with her success is her grandmother, Dorothea “Polly” Noonan, who began as a secretary in the New York state legislature at age twenty and grew to be a major force in Albany as a voice for women running for office. She was a close confidante of Albany mayor Erastus Corning and an associate of Daniel O’Connell, the man who controlled the Albany Democratic political machine for five decades (!) beginning in the 1920s. Of that trio, former New York governor Mario Cuomo told the New York Times in 2009 that “Dan O’Connell was the nominal leader. Corning was the de facto leader. Polly was the leader.”
Gillibrand called her grandmother a “larger-than-life” figure who was a “hardball player to the core.” Sitting in her Senate office, she recounts with a smile the days when she would be sitting in some Democrat’s campaign headquarters stuffing envelopes or, as often happened, putting bumper stickers on cars. (Gillibrand says that her grandmother used to deploy her and her cousins to put bumper stickers supporting her candidate over the bumper stickers supporting their opponents. After all, who could get mad at a kid for a little campaign dirty trick?)
The second person Gillibrand credits with her rise is her mother, Polly Rutnik, a lawyer who was one of only three women in her law school class at Suffolk University. (“Judges would call her ‘little lady,’ ” recalls Gillibrand.) Gillibrand said that in an age when most of her friends’ mothers chose to stay at home, her mom “decided to have a career” and, in so doing, became a “role model” for her and her circle of friends. Gillibrand proudly notes that of her six closest high school friends, five of them—including herself—went on to become lawyers.
And the third is Hillary Clinton. As a young lawyer in New York City in 1995, Gillibrand heard a speech that Clinton, then the first lady, gave in China making the case that “human rights are women’s rights—and women’s rights are human rights.” Said Gillibrand of that speech: “I felt inside that I wasn’t doing enough. Why was I not at that convention in Beijing?” Gillibrand’s first step was to get involved with the Women’s Leadership Forum, a group designed to train women for positions of, well, leadership in and out of public life. (Gillibrand said that it cost her $1,000 to join WLF, the largest check she had ever written—except for rent in New York—in her life.) Clinton was deeply involved in WLF and provided the impetus not only for Gillibrand to raise money for those in office but also to actually get involved herself. “She gave a speech that spoke to me,” said Gillibrand. “She said that if you don’t participate, you leave it to those who do and you may not like what they do. She’s so right.” Clinton, says Gillibrand, made her believe that women could and should run for office. (“I doubted myself,” she acknowledged. “How could I run for office? How could I be so bold? How could I be so arrogant?”)
It was also through WLF that Gillibrand found a foothold in politics. After being turned down by the U.S. attorney’s office as well as by the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment—“I didn’t even get an interview,” she said—Gillibrand decided to approach Andrew Cuomo, then the secretary of housing and urban development, after a speech he gave to WLF. Cuomo asked her if she was willing to move to Washington. She said yes, despite being up for partner at her law firm. Cuomo hired her as special counsel for the final seven months before the 2000 election, which, after Democrats lost, left Gillibrand without a job but with a major political bug.
She went back to work in corporate law but eventually moved to upstate New York—her father, Doug Rutnik, is a lobbyist and major force in state politics—to make a run for Congress in what looked like, at the time, a quixotic bid against Representative John Sweeney (R). Her candidacy became far less of a long shot as the race wore on, however, and Sweeney revealed himself to be a very flawed candidate (and person). First came pictures of a decidedly inebriated Sweeney at a fraternity party at Union College at Schenectady. Then came reports, just days before the election, that Sweeney’s wife had called the police because the congressman was “knocking her around.” Sweeney insisted the allegations were overstated and blamed Gillibrand for making them public. It didn’t matter. Gillibrand won. And most people assumed that’s where Gillibrand’s political career would take her—a nice, steady life.
Enter David Paterson, the embattled governor tasked with picking a replacement for Clinton, who was named secretary of state by President Obama in late 2008. Paterson’s search, which took on a soap operatic quality, included the likes of Andrew Cuomo, who took himself out of contention, and Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of the former president, whose unsteady public presence disqualified her as a choice. Gillibrand was the last person left standing and wound up being Paterson’s pick after a remarkably public process. Gillibrand, in a bow to her relative anonymity for most New Yorkers, had this to say when she was picked: “For many in New York State, this is the first time you’ve heard my name, and you don’t know much about me. Over the next two years, you will get to know me. And, more importantly, I will get to know you.” (So unknown was Gillibrand that the Associated Press ran a pronouncer—JILL-ih-brand—with the story announcing her appointment.)
Though Paterson touted her credentials as a moderate—she voted against several gun control measures in the House—Gillibrand quickly moved to the ideological left, recognizing the political leanings of the Empire State and of her future on the national political stage. (Gillibrand was the tenth most liberal senator, according to the 2010 vote ratings conducted by National Journal magazine—to the left of the likes of Minnesota senator Al Franken, for example.) She has also developed an issue portfolio sure to appeal to liberal Democrats; Gillibrand, for example, was leading agitator for the repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy regarding gays in the military. (Gillibrand was the first person in public life to shine a light on the dismissal of Lieutenant Dan Choi for being gay and was a major force for Senate hearings on the idea of repeal.) In an e-mail sent to her supporters, Gillibrand sought to lay claim to the credit for the repeal, which passed the Senate in late 2010: “It’s been a long, hard road, and I couldn’t have done it without your support,” she wrote.
Gillibrand’s pet issue, however, is transparency. She was the first member of Congress to put her official schedule online—including her meetings with lobbyists—and is one of only ten senators who files her fund-raising reports electronically with the Federal Election Commission. (In a bit of ridiculous arcana, senators still file paper reports detailing their contributions and expenditures to the secretary of the Senate. They are then uploaded—page by page—to the Internet, a laborious process that can delay access to the information for weeks.)
“Sunlight is the most effective disinfectant,” she explained. “If I am being lobbied by Group A, I want Group B to know. I thought our democracy would work better if people knew who I was taking meetings with.” A focus on transparency—cleaning up a government that most people believe doesn’t serve their interests—is a message that could well be a foundational building block of a presidential platform for Gillibrand.
Gillibrand’s aides insist neither she nor they discuss—publicly or privately—the possibility of her running for president in 2016. But the facts are these: the most oft-mentioned candidates—Cuomo, Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, Virginia senator Mark Warner—are all middle-aged, white males. And it’s hard to overestimate how big an advantage being a woman in a Democratic presidential primary field full of men actually is. Fifty-seven percent of the participants in the 2008 Iowa Democratic presidential caucuses and New Hampshire primary were women; Clinton lost the female vote to Obama in Iowa but won it by double digits in New Hampshire. (Clinton’s problem was not that she was a woman but that she was running against an African American candidate who more successfully consolidated that competing pillar of the Democratic base.)
There is a coveted slot then in any Democratic primary but particularly a presidential primary for a woman. And Gillibrand may be the woman best positioned—and most willing—to take the leap. The only other obvious person—whose politics might line up with a Democratic primary electorate—is Minnesota’s Amy Klobuchar, who seems to have little interest in national office. The other Democratic women in the Senate are either too old (Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Mikulski) or too moderate (Claire McCaskill, Mary Landrieu) to qualify as potentially serious contenders. Among the nation’s Democratic female governors, the presidential picks are decidedly thin too. There are only two women governors at the moment—Christine Gregoire in Washington State and Bev Perdue in North Carolina. Gregoire could run but has made no move toward doing so. Perdue was so unpopular in her home state that she decided not to seek a second term in November.
That leaves the likes of Gillibrand who is (a) a woman, (b) a (converted) liberal, (c) a fund-raising dynamo, and (d) from a large state with major influence in Democratic Party politics.
To (c): since 2007, Gillibrand has raised more than $23 million—a massive sum that allowed her to avoid a serious challenge in either her 2010 race (a special election to allow her to serve out the remaining two years of Clinton’s term) or her 2012 bid for a full six-year term. Fund-raising is the first bar that any presidential candidate needs to show he/she can clear. Without the ability to raise between $10 and $20 million—and likely much, much more—in the year before the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, it’s difficult for a candidate to be taken seriously. (Amazing but true.) Of the women contemplating—or mentioned as contemplating—presidential bids for Democrats in 2016, only Gillibrand has raised that amount of money before. And having done it before means she can—theoretically—do it again.
What all of the above tells me is that if Gillibrand wants to run for president, she and those close to her can make a solid case internally that she would at least have a chance at running a serious campaign. Of course there are major unanswered questions that could make all of Gillibrand’s presidential aspirations—if she, as I strongly suspect she does, has them—moot.
Gillibrand remains an almost entirely unproven candidate on the national stage. Yes, she has prospered—to date—in the confrontational world of the New York media, but she hasn’t undergone the full combing-through of her personal and political life that happens to every person who runs for president. Gillibrand’s position switches—conservative to liberal—from her time in the House to her time in the Senate would be fodder for her opponents (I can already imagine some sort of “wolf in sheep’s clothing” ad) as would her bare-knuckled approach to politics. She would also likely have to weather questions about whether she had enough (or the right) experience to serve as the Democratic standard-bearer. In 2016, she will have spent less than a decade in the Senate after serving in the House for a single full term.
Politics, of course, is about taking chances. Leaping even (or especially) when the outcome is murky is the hallmark of all great politicians. There are no sure things in politics; just ask Hillary Clinton. Gillibrand seems to understand intuitively the need to take risks, a trait she credits—not surprisingly—to her grandmother. “Never be afraid of trying,” Gillibrand recalls her grandmother telling her. “The fight is worth the fight.” If she runs for president in 2016, that could well be Gillibrand’s campaign slogan.