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January 27, 2009, 4:00 a.m.
Challenging Gillibrand
Can Peter King do it?
By Mark Hemingway
When Caroline Kennedy was still a top contender to replace Hillary Clinton as the junior senator from New York, it had been widely reported that Republican congressman Peter King of Long Island was gearing up to challenge her in 2010.
Since then, Kennedy has dropped out of the running, amid considerable acrimony between the Kennedy clan and New York governor David Paterson. Paterson has instead tapped Kirsten Gillibrand, a blue-dog congresswoman from upstate who is in some ways the antithesis of Kennedy liberalism.
Despite this turn of events, King appears still to be interested in making a run for the Senate in 2010. Yesterday King told Newsday he’s “seriously considering” running against Gillibrand.
Just last week, though, he told National Review Online that he was interested in seeking a Senate seat because of the particular dynamics a race against Caroline Kennedy would have. “That is a race I would look forward to,” he said in an interview from his office in Washington. “To me this is a chance to draw a distinction between a dilettante liberal and a blue-collar conservative.” He noted that Caroline Kennedy would come to politics with so much baggage, and receive so much attention nationally, that the race would be radically altered.
“I think it would really transcend party lines, and the whole country would be looking at the race. She would have to explain her positions,” King said. “If you’re running against just a standard Democrat from New York, the media is not going to focus that much. They’re going to get away with saying one thing downstate, something else upstate, and something else in New York City.” King went so far as to say, “If [Paterson] picks other Democrats they’d be able to paper over a lot of the differences.”
Gillibrand, then, would seem to be a much tougher opponent for King than Caroline Kennedy would have been. But after the selection of Gillibrand was announced, King spent the weekend with advisers trying to figure out whether running for the Senate remained a viable option. In a follow-up phone interview Monday with National Review Online, King tentatively concluded the answer is yes.
“It would be a different type of race,” he said. “I am still very interested. It’s different than Caroline Kennedy because I had prepared for that for seven weeks, going through it statewide, region by region, county by county, figuring out what her weaknesses were—because again [Democrats] start out 2 million votes ahead.”
King said that Gillibrand’s reputation as a conservative Democrat is overblown, and that it comes down to “guns, immigration, and one vote on the Iraq War. . . . Other than that, her voting record is pretty standard for a liberal.”
King also observed that Gillibrand is being pushed farther to the left. “As far as policy differences, Chuck Schumer has already said she’s going to change her position on guns. . . . As she moves farther to the left to satisfy the Democratic base, I can get back a lot, if not all, of the traditional Republican vote upstate.”
The long-serving congressman is a well-known entity in the state. “Politically I see openings because she only has one term in Congress and hasn’t distinguished herself very much. That gives me a real opening to do well in New York City suburbs—Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, Rockland—and also in the outer boroughs: Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. And even though she’s from upstate, she’s not known there. She’s just basically in a congressional district.”
The fact that the New York media are awash in rumors that backroom deals were cut for Gillibrand’s appointment isn’t likely to help her when she must earn her appointed seat in 2010. Newsday reported that King himself “called her selection by Gov. David A. Paterson a ‘fraud,’ ‘payoff’ and a ‘backroom’ deal.” But King is known to have excellent rapport with Paterson—so much so that the Democratic governor was quoted as saying he was open to appointing a Republican to the Senate seat, specifically King. “Peter King and I are great friends. We go to dinner often. He should have called,” Paterson said.
King is adamant that he did not say the things about Gillibrand’s appointment that Newsday attributed to him. “I didn’t say that, and that bothered me. I did not say that. When I’m asked if I think there’s any illegality, I say no. And fraud would be an illegality.”
That’s not to say that King thinks the circumstances around Gillibrand’s appointment are beyond question: “No matter what party we’re in, we’re entitled to know what happened.”
One important dynamic would be the same whether King ran against Kennedy or Gillibrand: money—as in, he’ll need a king’s ransom to mount a Senate race in New York.
“The only caveat I put on [running for the Senate] is that in the first month I would have to see a real opportunity for [the money] to come in, because money will be no object to her and I’ll need $35 to $40 million. And my family fortune is extensive, but not that extensive,” he said, laughing.
— Mark Hemingway is an NRO staff reporter.
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