WASHINGTON – As Hillary Clinton launches her exploratory committee for a run for the U.S. Senate and starts her “listening tour” of New York this week, President Clinton will be thousands of miles away on a westbound tour of the poorest spots in the country.
With TV cameras filming her every move and reporters shouting questions, Mrs. Clinton’s trip through upstate New York next week will be her biggest test yet as a possible Senate candidate.
Mrs. Clinton’s tour begins Wednesday at the upstate farm of retiring Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan (D-N.Y.), where Mrs. Clinton plans to announce she’s forming an exploratory committee for the possible Senate run. From there, she’s scheduled to go to Cooperstown, Utica, Syracuse and Albany.
In an essay in this week’s Newsweek, ex-White House aide George Stephanopoulos advises Mrs. Clinton to “get close to the people” because her reputation as an “opportunistic carpetbagger” is a “serious problem.”
The problem is compounded by Mrs. Clinton’s use of Air Force jets and her Secret Service entourage. “The motorcade and Secret Service details separate you from ordinary folks,” Stephanopoulos writes in the magazine, which hits the stands tomorrow.
But Mrs. Clinton’s spokesman, Howard Wolfson, said: “She doesn’t really have a motorcade. The president has a serious motorcade. The First Lady doesn’t have that … In New York City, they didn’t even block off the streets.”
Stephanopoulos also advises Mrs. Clinton to get cozy with the press, to “be ready to answer tough questions about the Clinton scandals,” and to learn to handle criticism of her failed health-care plan, which Moynihan once called bad for New York.
“One of the goals of this trip is for her to spend time with New Yorkers in small groups, listening to their concerns and talking with them,” Wolfson said.
“She absolutely intends to be open and accessible to the press.”
While Mrs. Clinton is schmoozing around the state, the president will see Appalachian poverty in Hazard, Ky., the depressed Delta town of Clarksdale, Miss., and the Pine Ridge Indian reservation in South Dakota, where 31 percent of the residents live in poverty and 46 percent are unemployed.
“This will be the first time a sitting president has visited an Indian reservation since Coolidge,” said White House deputy chief of staff Maria Echaveste.
The president’s poverty tour comes during a boom period in the country’s economy.