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The Balancing Act
What will running for president mean for Hillary Clinton's job in the Senate?

By Edward-Isaac Dovere

Overcoming History
With so many senators from both parties mulling bids—eight are currently assumed to be in some stage of deliberation—Sen. Hillary Clinton may not be as dogged by what has become a common refrain in dime store political analysis: that sitting senators cannot win the presidency.

Though 15 of the 42 men elected president were once senators, only Warren Harding and John Kennedy moved directly from the Senate to the White House. (In a bit of arguably meaningless trivia, both were dead within three years of being inaugurated.) Historically, senators lose party primaries and they lose general elections, which most attribute to long voting records which opponents can use to rake them over the coals, and a perception that they do a lot less of significance than governors.

Never in American history have two incumbent senators faced each other as the major party nominees in a general election. But then again, never before has the experience of being a senator been such a potential asset, argued Bob Shrum, a veteran of several presidential attempts and the senior adviser to Kerry’s 2004 campaign.

“Governors face a disadvantage in 2008 because they have to go out of their way to demonstrate ability with issues of domestic security,” Shrum said.

Senators, on the other hand, have debated and decided domestic security down to the tiny nuances and details.

— Edward-Isaac Dovere

Hillary Clinton's decision to form a presidential exploratory committee was hardly a surprise.

Now that New Yorkers have twice elected her to do a job in the Senate, the question becomes real: how does a woman who will presumably need to be touching down in every corner of most states in the nation find time for the minutiae of legislative work?

Like it or not, we are about to find out the answer.

The most obvious way to judge a person’s commitment to her job is seeing how often she shows up to work. To date, Clinton has had an almost impeccable attendance record in the Senate. She missed just five votes in the 107th Congress, 19 in the 108th and 16 in the 109th—absentee percentages of 0.8, 2.8 and 2.5 respectively. In the new session, she has already missed two of the 12 votes, but that counts the time she spent over Martin Luther King, Jr. Day weekend on a fact-finding mission in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Still, she found time to rack up quite a few frequent flyer miles over her first term, traveling the country to campaign for fellow Democrats and raise money for herself.

That may be about to change.

The increasingly frontloaded presidential primary and caucus schedule means that campaigning for the 2008 race will begin long before 2008 itself does. For the first time, Nevada and South Carolina will weigh in early, along with Iowa and New Hampshire. That will mean a lot of retail politics in a lot of different places, some of them five-hour flights from Clinton’s constituents and her Capitol Hill office.

Running a campaign with direct voter contact may prove especially important for Clinton, argued Michael Tomasky, author of “Hillary’s Turn: Her Improbable, Victorious Senate Campaign.” Clinton’s single greatest electoral weakness, in Tomasky’s view, is how many people already know her and know what they think of her.

“The way she won support in New York in 2000—and particularly upstate, where she did quite well—is she spent months and months and months going around meetings of citizens, sometimes in pretty small groups, and taking questions and pressing the flesh, and really doing retail politics in its classic sense,” Tomasky said.

With the spread-out stops of presidential campaigns, candidates often hop from place to place on a jet, stopping only to give a stump speech before barreling down the runway again.

“That’s a really different kind of campaigning, and it plays in my view to her comparative weakness rather than her comparative strength,” Tomasky said.

A successful Clinton presidential campaign may therefore require as much time as possible at potlucks in Dubuque and carnivals in South Sumter—which means as little time as can be managed in Washington and New York.

Clinton has been a powerful voice in the Capitol on national security issues, keeping military bases open and working with partners on both sides of the aisle to win major funding for New York interests. While officially focused full-time on the Senate during her first term, most agree she was an enormously effective senator—and surprisingly so. This is not necessarily contingent on attendance, but being there certainly helps.

To see how things might change, one need look no further than the attendance record of John Kerry, the Massachusetts senator and 2004 Democratic nominee.

For the Congressional session in the run-up to and during that race, Kerry missed 72.3 percent of the Senate votes. Kerry’s primary opponent and subsequent running mate, North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, missed 45.2 percent.

“Fortunately, while I was away from the Senate during some of the campaign, I never missed any critical votes,” Kerry wrote by email, reflecting on his experiences. “I left the campaign trail and flew to Washington a number of times when the margin of a vote was so close that my one vote would make the difference.”

Back then, Republicans held a 51-49 seat advantage. Today, the Democrats control the chamber by the same narrow margin. Critical votes may come more often than a woman with a calendar of engagements in Iowa might want.

A Minefield of Issues
Hundreds of issues are likely to come before Congress over the 21 months between now and the presidential election. Though Democrats control the Senate, they have only a 51-49 majority, meaning that Sen. Hillary Clinton could occasionally find herself casting decisive votes on issues that make her choose between what is best for her constituents and what is best for fanning her presidential prospects.

· Universal Health Care: New Yorkers are generally in favor of creating a universal health care system, and Clinton has expressed support for the idea as well. However, though, expressing her support too strongly as she goes forward carries a political risk: a major political embarrassment during her early years as first lady was the defeat of the plan she helped create for her husband’s administration.

· Homeland Security: Federal anti-terrorism appropriations to states have been in constant flux. New York’s representatives in Congress have all demanded more, Clinton among them. But if that means taking money away from police or fire departments in lower-risk areas in battleground primary or general election states, Clinton may have to adjust her Senate votes.

· Finance Regulations and Immigration: Mayor Michael Bloomberg (R) announced in his State of the City address that he and Sen. Charles Schumer (D) had begun a joint initiative to open borders to highly skilled workers. They will also campaign to ease other regulations they say hurt the financial services industry in New York.

As the representative of New York, Clinton would presumably join this effort. But as a presidential candidate looking to assure people around the country that they will not be losing their jobs, Clinton may be in more of a bind.

· Taxes: Proposals to change the alternative minimum tax are also likely to be considered. Though many New Yorkers would see their tax burdens diminished by changing the threshold to qualify for this tax, most support keeping it in place. How this might affect Clinton’s decision-making process is unclear, though as a rule, presidential hopefuls look to cut taxes where they can.

· Funding Formulas: These formulas, which affect everything from transportation appropriations to Medicaid funding, generally favor either rural or urban areas.

“It isn’t in voting in new laws,” said City Comptroller Bill Thompson (D), looking at where Congress can have the biggest impact locally. “It is in some of the formulas that affect New York State and New York City.”

A New York senator would likely look to get more transportation money for the state. A presidential candidate looking to rally voters in every corner of the state might not. — Edward-Isaac Dovere

What those critical votes will decide may also prove important. New York’s interests do not always align with the interests of other areas of the country where presidential candidates look to make an impact. Clinton could find her allegiances to her current job and the one she wants pitted against each other.

New School University president Bob Kerrey, the former Nebraska senator who ran for the Democratic nomination in 1992, remembers the feeling of being torn.

“There are moments when what you support for your home state is not good for the delegates you’re looking to sway,” he admitted.

Issues of parochial interest like the Northeast Dairy Compact, which helps subsidize many local farmers, but is unpopular in Wisconsin, might force Clinton to take stances which leave either her constituents or portions of the national electorate unhappy, Kerrey said.

Projects that are important to a region but lack major national relevance have come to be known as “bridges to nowhere” but, Kerrey argued, “oftentimes at the local level, they don’t feel like they’re ‘to nowhere’ at all.”

For those who vote against these projects, Kerrey said, “that’s not going to win you delegates or electoral votes.”

Clinton will be pressured on larger issues as well. The Iraq War was never hugely popular in New York, and is proving ever less so within the Democratic Party. As things stand, Clinton will soon vote on whether to authorize funding for the president’s proposed escalation of troop levels in Iraq, forcing her to either give de facto backing to the president’s plan, or risk being portrayed as unwilling to support the troops.

Nonetheless, Kerrey warned, if the bulk of her constituents disagree with her positions on the war or other issues, that will take its toll back home.

“It’ll probably happen to Sen. Clinton that she’s going to become less popular in New York,” he said.

Some conditions in Washington do favor her. With the Democrats controlling the Senate, potentially troublesome issues for prospective presidential candidates, like flag burning or anti-gay marriage Constitutional amendments, are less likely to reach the floor. And with at least five of his own party’s senators likely to be running, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) will probably work toward an at least somewhat accommodating schedule overall.

Clinton will also be able to make double use of her time at home. After a few hours tending to constituents in her district office, she will be able to skip out for visits to the many Democratic donors in the city. Along the way, she can stop by all the major television studios and newsrooms a national candidate could ever want, all within just blocks of her Third Avenue office.

But as the presidential race heats up, Clinton may begin to understand the decision Bob Dole made in 1996, when he resigned from the Senate to run against her husband.

Dole, who had been Gerald Ford’s 1976 vice presidential running mate and the longest-serving Republican Senate leader in history, ran three times for the presidency before securing the nomination that spring. Then he abruptly announced he was leaving to “seek the presidency with nothing to fall back on but the judgment of the people, and nowhere to go but the White House or home.”

Getting away from the contentious debates about welfare reform then roiling Congress probably gave him some encouragement, too.

Of course, at that point, Dole had been in the Senate for 28 years. He had been chair of the Republican National Committee, the vice presidential nominee and was on his third presidential run. He was 73. The presidential race was either going to be the cap to one of the longest and most distinguished careers in American politics or his graceful swansong. Mostly, it was the latter.

But in her fellow New York senator, Chuck Schumer, now the third-ranking Democrat in the Senate, Clinton has a powerful colleague to pick up some of the slack she will leave behind as she travels to events in Manchester, Reno and beyond. She has a large staff to whom she already delegates much of the grittier Senate business. As she goes national, these mini-substitute senators will increase their workload accordingly, explained Larry Sabato, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. So there may not be cause for concern at all.

“Rationally, you would say, ‘Well, that person is going to be devoting thousands of hours to the presidential candidacy, so they wouldn’t be doing the job as senator,’” Sabato said. “That assumes that the senator really does the work, which is questionable in most cases, and that assumes that the work matters, which is questionable in most cases.”

And If She Loses…
Though Sen. Hillary Clinton (D) seems almost certain to run for president in 2008, many are skeptical about whether she will win either the Democratic nomination or the general election. If she fails, Clinton would still have her job in the Senate to return to, with four years left before the end of her current term.

There are 10 current senators who have run presidential campaigns at some point, however brief.

An unsuccessful Clinton would likely return to the Senate with a better understanding not only of broader national concerns, but of intricate local ones as well. So seems to be the case for Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, the unsuccessful 2004 Democratic nominee.

“Life on the campaign trail left me with a deeper understanding of the issues, people, and problems our nation faces, and I use that knowledge every day as a senator,” Kerry wrote over email. “It can only strengthen your case to be able to point to a broad and far-reaching experience like that when making the case for a cause.”

While many Democratic senators seemed to distance themselves from Kerry in the immediate aftermath of his loss, he has for the most part regained his stature within the Senate, an institution known for protecting its own. And though he has since occasionally generated more attention for himself than he might otherwise like—as when he fumbled a joke about the intelligence of the president a few days before last year’s midterm elections which was misinterpreted as a slight against the troops—Kerry has, for the most part, been able to slide back into his old role in the Senate. With the Senate’s new Democratic majority, he assumed the chairmanship of the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Committee.

“It helps in many ways, but I’m not going to kid you, nothing would have made a bigger difference than if we’d found a few more votes in Ohio to win the election two years ago,” he wrote. “But I think I’ve returned to the Senate a much more effective legislator.”

An unsuccessful Clinton who lost a run for the presidency would be deeply attuned to all sorts of national concerns. That, according to Clinton campaign biographer Michael Tomasky, might help move her toward a post he thinks would suit her well: Democratic leader in the Senate.

After all, a presidential run in 2004 even had the power to transform Dennis Kucinich from a virtually unknown Ohio congressman to a much-discussed Democratic advocate for peace and political player in his own right.

“There’s a thing about being involved nationally which causes members [of Congress] to share their views with you in a way that otherwise they might not feel compelled to do,” Kucinich said, reflecting on his own experiences back in the House after the 2004 race.

Kucinich said this led to natural coalition building, enabling him to do everything from preserving a NASA center in his district to being a more effective protestor of the Iraq War. He said he now understands where his colleagues come from, literally and figuratively, and they understand and know him.

So though 2008 is generally agreed to be Clinton’s best, and perhaps only, shot at winning a presidential race, she will likely land on her feet—unless she goes down in a humiliating, clobbering defeat, or commits a horrible gaffe.

“Even though you’ll have to live with the fact that a paragraph about your losing presidential campaign will be in your obituary,” explained Professor Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, “you can win by losing.”

— Edward-Isaac Dovere