WASHINGTON -- Hillary Clinton may make of herself a gift to the state of New York, which must replace Sen. Pat Moynihan, who is retiring. So she may wish to prepare answers to the sort of questions she can expect, such as:
In upstate New York (yes, Mrs. Clinton, there is such a place; it is somewhat north of the Carlyle Hotel), the industrial corridor from Schenectady-Troy to Buffalo is hurting. The corridor includes Seneca Falls, birthplace of women's suffrage, to which you have made a pilgrimage. Women began to get impatient for the vote when they began to get money, some of them by working in Seneca Falls' knitting mills. Today, the mills' owners are moving operations to North Carolina. Do the problems of this corridor cause you sleepless nights down there within the beltway?You favor carving a Palestinian state into Israel's back. Schools run by the Palestinian Authority, which would run such a state, teach (among other anti-Semitic propaganda) that the Holocaust is a Zionist lie. How is Israel helped by a contiguous state run by Holocaust deniers?
You directed the drafting of your husband's health-care bill, of which Martha Derthick of the University of Virginia wrote: "I have never read an official document that seemed so suffused with coercion and political naivete . . . with its drastic prescriptions for controlling the conduct of state governments, employers, drug manufacturers, doctors, hospitals and you and me." Was that your idea of nifty legislation?
Your husband said your legislation failed because sinister interests misled the American people about it. Moynihan said, "The American people got it clear enough." He said your plan clearly aimed "to cut the number of doctors in the country by a quarter" in order to cut demand by limiting supply. "If you have fewer doctors you have fewer doctor bills. But you don't associate it with improving medicine." And, Moynihan noted, your bill aimed to cut costs by cutting "the number of specialists in half." Moynihan vehemently objected, arguing that specialists are a function of science -- new discoveries create new specialties. Moynihan, defending New York's great teaching hospitals (have you heard of them?), which produce specialists, said, "We are not swamped with specialists; we abound in them. And that is surely the glory of this great moment of medical discovery." Should the most intellectual senator be replaced by an advocate of anti-scientific, dumbed-down medicine?
Your health-care task force met in secrecy that was challenged in a lawsuit by the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons. The judge, imposing $286,000 in sanctions against the administration for the AAPS's legal fees, denounced what he called the "cover-up" of efforts to keep the health-care planning secret. Noting that "reprehensible" misstatements had been made to him, he denounced decisions "made at the highest levels of government," which must be held accountable "when its officials run amok." He said the executive branch "was dishonest with this court" and declared that "some government officials never learn that the cover-up can be worse than the underlying conduct." Does such behavior run in the family?
Webb Hubbell, the felon who is your former law partner, was made the third-highest official in the Justice Department during your supervision of the staffing of the most politicized, least-trusted department in modern memory. Will you promise that if you are elected you will not serve on the Judiciary Committee?
Some say the $100,000 you made as a rookie "investor" with a $1,000 plunge in cattle futures looks awfully like a bribe. You say fiddlesticks, it was just the fruit of reading The Wall Street Journal. If you are that gifted with money, will you promise to seek a seat on the Finance Committee?
In 1992, you participated in an American Bar Association tribute to Anita Hill, saying that all women who care about "integrity and morality in the workplace are in professor Anita Hill's debt." How fares morality in your current workplace, the White House?
You believed Hill's assertion that Clarence Thomas talked inappropriately to her, although she seems to have made at most one contemporaneous report of this to a friend, and followed him to a new job and invited him to speak where she was teaching in Oklahoma. Do you disbelieve Juanita Broaddrick, who at the time told five people separately that your husband raped her?
Utica is (a) a heavy metal rock group; (b) a porn star; (c) a new cosmetic available at Bergdorf's; (d) a city upstate?
Was there a wee barb in Moynihan's statement that your candidacy would bring "Illinois/Arkansas enthusiasm" to New York?
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