In once-safe GOP seat, a serious race emerges

Tom Curry National affairs writer • Profile • E-mail

SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. — Kirsten Gillibrand, the Democratic candidate in New York’s 20^th Congressional District, was looking for votes Thursday at the annual fair in upstate Washington County.

Amid the cows, sheep, horses and barbecued chicken, Gillibrand came upon Roger Jones, a Democrat from neigboring Warren County, who was wearing a National Rifle Association baseball cap and an NRA T-shirt.

“It seems like you’ve been avoiding it,” Jones told Gillibrand, referring to the issue of gun control.

Gillibrand was ready. “I am pro-Second Amendment, I support hunters’ rights,” she shot back. “I come from a hunting family. ... I eat so much venison and so much turkey in my house.”

She needs to be fully prepared. Although heavily favored Sen. Hillary Clinton and gubernatorial candidate Eliot Spitzer are at the top of the ticket in New York this November — and would seem to make it a sure thing for the area's entire Democratic slate — the 39-year-old first-time candidate is trying to unseat four-term Republican Rep. John Sweeney, 51, in a heavily rural district he won with 66 percent of the vote in 2004.

Generous Democratic donor
And in terms of Jones' concerns, she carries some pretty heavy political baggage.

Gillibrand, a lawyer in the same firm as celebrated attorney David Boies — he argued Al Gore's side before the U.S. Supreme Court in the 2000 election — has been an openhanded donor to liberal Democrats in recent years, ($21,750 from 2001 to 2004) giving money to the campaigns of gun control advocates Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and 2004 presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan Washington group that tracks campaign donations. (Sweeney's campaign has gotten $2,000 from the NRA's political action committee.)

However, she promised Jones that “I’m going to send out a mailer” detailing her commitment to the Second Amendment.

“I’m just a woodchuck from up in the woods,” Jones told Gillibrand, adding “I’m a one issue-voter,” as a Washington County Democratic chair Sheila Comar handed him a Gillibrand brochure spelling out her positions on other issues.

After Gillibrand walked on in search of other votes, Jones said, “I haven’t made up my mind” on whether to vote for her. “Spitzer, Hillary, they’re all anti-gun," he said. Gillibrand “has got to divorce herself from them.”

Heavily Republican constituency
She also has to win over a huge section of voters who are not usually inclined to vote Democrat. The mostly rural 20th District, which includes lots of dairy farms, woods (and woodchucks) and the horseracing Mecca of Saratoga Springs, has about 88,000 more registered Republicans than registered Democrats, as well as 18,000 independents.

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At a time when the Gallup Poll finds that nationally 65 percent of Americans disapprove of the job Congress is doing, the question is: will that discontent be strong enough in this district to oust Sweeney?

Born in the nearby state capital, Albany, and educated at Dartmouth and UCLA Law School, Gillibrand was a counsel to Housing Secretary Andrew Cuomo in the Clinton administration.

After that, “I was a lawyer in Manhattan for a while, but we moved back up here as soon as I got married and wanted to have a family, because I really wanted to raise my family near my parents and my cousins,” she explained Thursday. “I know the families of this district very well because I’ve lived here my whole life. … I visited every community in the district many, many times, I grew up in the northern part every summer.”

Opponent comes out swinging
Sweeney portrays Gillibrand as an urbanite and a carpetbagger; his mailers feature a photo of her former Manhattan apartment.

“She wouldn’t know the difference between milk prices and French wine prices,” Sweeney scoffed Wednesday as he campaigned at the Washington County Fair.

But for a non-incumbent, Gillibrand has raised a lot of money — an impressive $1.2 million by July 1, compared to Sweeney’s $1.7 million.

Sweeney implies the inflow of cash is orchestrated. The Democrats, he contended, “can’t make the plausible argument they can take back the majority without having races like mine and everybody else in the Northeast. That’s the sales pitch [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] Rahm Emanuel is giving to the nation. He’s trying to create a buzz.”

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