Like the majority of people these days, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has announced her candidacy for President of the United States in 2020.
According to most polls, zero to three percent of Democratic voters would choose Gillibrand among the slate of likely primary candidates. Her unpopularity may seem strange to prognosticators who initially saw the senator as a plausible inheritor of the Hillary Clinton coalition of 2016.
Between 2007 and 2009, as a Blue Dog Democrat from a conservative upstate district in the House of Representatives, Gillibrand pushed an anti-immigrant agenda – advocating against plans to give driver’s licenses to undocumented New Yorkers while voting to speed up deportations, strengthen border security, and withhold federal funding for sanctuary cities – and earned a 100 percent positive rating from the NRA. In the Senate, however, she instantaneously adopted New York City’s liberalism, co-sponsoring the DREAM Act and introducing the Gun Trafficking Prevention Act.
While some observers may have regarded Gillibrand’s midcareer about-face as cynical, a sizable contingent of white-collar, educated Democrats actually admires a politics of cynicism, which to them registers as savvy pragmatism. Blue-state residents whose own hollow, self-interested ambitions have elevated them to the managerial rung of the corporate ladder have learned to negatively correlate principle and efficacy, valuing candidates like the Clintons for their smarts, flexibility, and ostensible electability. Gillibrand has managed to lose even these Democrats, and her current campaign may come to represent a cautionary tale about the struggles of corporate-backed centrists amid increasing pressure from the left.
In 2016, Clinton supporters touted their candidate’s feminist credentials, painting rival Bernie Sanders as a stodgy mansplainer buoyed by a gang of misogynistic brocialists intent on thwarting Hillary’s quest to break the glass ceiling. When the #MeToo movement began in 2017, Gillibrand spotted an opportunity to become a feminist political icon in her own right by calling out sexual predators in government – specifically Senator Al Franken, whom she effectively forced to resign before the Senate Ethics Committee could review the sexual misconduct allegations against him; and then Bill Clinton himself, who she said should have stepped down in 1998 on account of the Lewinski affair.
But Gillibrand had miscalculated, failing to recognize that the purported feminism of the moderate wing of the Democratic Party in 2016 had in fact formed primarily as a bad-faith cudgel to ward off a socialist insurgency led by a candidate who happened to be male. The centrists who cringed at Donald Trump’s vulgar sexism had never actually wanted to see dignified, intelligent men of power within their own ranks held accountable for their misdeeds. All along, substantive feminism had been a leftist cause, not a liberal one, and today many liberals hate Gillibrand for her betrayals of Franken and Clinton about as much as they hate Jill Stein for whatever she’s supposedly done. For 2020, the Clintonists appear already to have coalesced around Kamala Harris, not Gillibrand.
Meanwhile, the New York senator will never find a home on the left, even as her official platform by now rivals that of Bernie Sanders for “radicalism.” She knows which way the wind is blowing, so she’s stumping for Medicare-for-All. She also wants a Green New Deal and a jobs guarantee. She even wants to abolish ICE, or so she’s said. A staunch advocate for Israel’s interests throughout her career, she ended up in 2019 voting against the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, which he had co-sponsored in 2017 in an effort to criminalize pro-Palestinian activism.
Leftists, however, are unlikely to applaud Gillibrand’s canny willingness to pivot to a new set of policies whenever she perceives a shift in popular opinion. What they want is the policies themselves – not a shrewd, politically motivated gambit to seize the progressive momentum surrounding those policies, followed by a series of judicious compromises, which obviously is what Gillibrand has planned.
For her, politics has always been first and foremost about raising money and then about saying whatever voters seem to want to hear. Sometimes she gets it right, and sometimes she gets it wrong, but she’ll never quite understand that the voters pushing for Medicare-for-All will under no circumstances accept a candidate who says she favors single-payer healthcare and then attends a fundraiser held in her honor by a Pfizer executive, as CNBC reported she would in March.
To better understand how ill-suited Gillibrand is for this political moment, one can read her 2014 autobiography Off the Sidelines: Speak Up, Be Fearless, and Change Your World, a girl-power manifesto that transparently sought to capitalize on the readership generated by Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 hit Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. In Gillibrand’s book, which functions in large part as a how-to guide for women struggling to balance work, family, and a strict diet, the senator reveals how she mistook her own ideologically empty careerism for progressive righteousness and ended up in Congress as a result.
According to Off the Sidelines, a dearth of female representation in Washington inspired Gillibrand, a highly paid corporate lawyer in Manhattan, to enter public service, which meant inserting herself into a political system built by men and making no effort whatsoever to transform it. So malleable was she that, when her first boss decided that the name she had gone by her entire life, Tina, sounded girlish and unprofessional, she switched without complaint to her theretofore unused birth name Kirsten, even though it “hardly sounded like myself.”
Before that, however, Gillibrand grew up in a family embedded in boss Dan O’Connell’s deeply corrupt Democratic political machine in Albany – her grandmother, Polly Noonan, was the lifelong companion of Erastus Corning II, who served as mayor for 40 years at O’Connell’s behest. When Gillibrand decided to get in on the action, she was living in New York City, where she had fewer family connections. Instead, she used money as her passport into the political arena.
What makes Off the Sidelines fascinating and even revelatory is the openness with which it acknowledges the centrality of money in Democratic politics. Its unabashedness owes to its awareness of its intended audience, a privileged set of businesswomen, socialites, and other movers-and-shakers. They already know that this is how the world works.
Gillibrand doesn’t pretend that she got her start as a grassroots activist. Rather, she claims that she saw that most of the big, important jobs in government were occupied by men, and that didn’t sit right with her – she, too, wanted a big, important job where she could “make a difference” in some generic sense of the phrase.
“I called a friend whose mother, Nancy Hoit, was active in politics nationally,” Gillibrand explains. “When I called Nancy, she couldn’t have been nicer. She told me to join the New York City chapter of the Women’s Leadership Forum. The organization, in turn, said they’d be just thrilled if I joined. All I needed to do was write a check for $1,000.” Gillibrand wrote the check.
In 2000, Hillary Clinton, Gillibrand’s hero, announced her candidacy for the U.S. Senate in New York. After trying unsuccessfully to get hired by her campaign, Gillibrand realized that she would have to increase her annual donation budget from $2,000 to $10,000 to gain proximity to her idol. Eventually, she paid for a chance to meet Hillary at a dinner on the Upper East Side, and then again in Tuxedo Park, where the former First Lady granted her an opportunity to throw a fundraiser on her behalf, with a $50,000 goal.
Fortunately, all of Gillibrand’s friends were rich, too, and the turnout for her event impressed Hillary. Still, Gillibrand struggled to find a real job in government until she approached Andrew Cuomo, then Secretary of HUD, after he gave a speech at the Women’s Leadership Forum. In her telling, she grumbled about the difficulty of finding a foothold in politics as a newcomer: “I’m hard-working, well educated… and I can’t break in. It really seems that it’s an insider’s game.”
Here, Gillibrand doesn’t acknowledge that, of course, Andrew Cuomo had granted her a face-to-face precisely because she was already an insider. (Governor Mario Cuomo had appointed Gillibrand’s grandmother vice chairperson of the state Democratic Party in 1982 as a reward for her fundraising efforts.) The younger Cuomo offered Gillibrand a job at HUD on the spot, where she helped design “job incentive programs for single mothers” until George W. Bush’s inauguration in 2001.
Soon, she and her husband, a venture capitalist, bought a house in New York’s 20th Congressional District in order to enable an eventual run against the incumbent Republican John Sweeney. Gillibrand paid $10,000 to a pollster to measure her electoral chances, which initially didn’t look great. Republicans outnumbered Democrats two-to-one near her home in the rural outskirts of the Capital District, but Gillibrand had a powerful ally on the Republican side: Governor George Pataki, to whom she had a connection through her father, a lobbyist for Lockheed Martin and Morgan Stanley.
According to the Times-Union in Albany, Pataki had turned against the Republican congressman Sweeney because, after the 9/11 attacks, he had “developed a formula to ensure that New York City and then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg received a proportionate share of the [federal] aid.” The terms of the proposed split between City and State angered Pataki, who subsequently introduced Gillibrand to big-time donors in Albany. She defeated Sweeney in the 2006 midterms.
In early 2009, Hillary Clinton vacated her Senate seat to become Secretary of State, leaving Governor David Paterson to appoint her replacement. According to Gillibrand, Paterson knew that his appointee would need a “strong support network” to survive both a 2010 special election and the 2012 regular election. But based on her expensive campaign in 2008, Gillibrand “could raise the necessary funds” for back-to-back races, so Paterson picked her.
In the Senate, Gillibrand distributed copies to her staff of the Oprah-approved self-book The Secret, which teaches readers that picturing themselves accomplishing their greatest ambitions can function as means to achieve them, under the theory that imagination and belief have the capacity to bend reality. Gillibrand used the technique in the service of her own highest objective: obtaining heaps of campaign cash.
“During my 2010 election,” she recounts, “I set a grandiose fundraising goal for the first quarter: $3 million. I knew this wasn’t entirely realistic, but I believed it was crucial for my credibility in Washington. To keep my thoughts positive I changed my computer password to 3M1stQ. (You can laugh, but it worked.) A positive mindset sets a tone for my office.”
Off the Sidelines chronicles Gillibrand’s relentless determination to become great at her extremely political job in a completely apolitical sense: she works late, attends countless events and meetings, wisely manages her staff, and casts votes while parenting sick children. It is not a chronicle of her ideas, because she has none. Sometimes, a particular cause – improving safety regulations for infant beds, or repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” – will jump out at her, and she will fight tirelessly for it, but together these priorities don’t add up to any conscious political philosophy. When she first met George W. Bush, she “thanked him for his service.”
Her view of her own advancement in government as inherently a feminist achievement, irrespective of the liberalism or conservatism of her legislative record, doesn’t require her to develop any mission larger than her personal success as a politician to satisfy her sense of self-importance (which is the driving motivation for her career). Five years old, Off the Sidelines is already a time capsule from a different era of American political history, when Democrats didn’t have to choose sides in an ideological battle between centrism and leftism, because no such battle was meaningfully taking place.
In those halcyon days, barely anyone in the general public cared about policy. The job of politicians was to project an air of reason and decency; to run on a milquetoast, focus-grouped platform of vague campaign promises for which no one would ever hold them accountable; and to collect money from rich donors in exchange for keeping their taxes low. Today, even Kirsten Gillibrand has sworn off contributions from corporate PACs for her 2020 campaign.
The promise is symbolic: the money from corporate executives will find its way into Gillibrand’s campaign treasury by another means. Without it, she’d presumably dematerialize. You might say she’s dematerializing anyway.
