Political Lessons Taken on the Fly by Gillibrand (NYT 2/2/09)

[Muttocracy]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/nyregion/03gillibrand.html?hp=&pagewanted=all

a few snips from the long article:

Political Lessons Taken on the Fly by Gillibrand

By MICHAEL POWELL
Published: February 2, 2009

...

Her appointment occasioned yawps of disappointment from downstate Democrats, who tend to view Senate seats as proprietary possessions. Charles E. Goodell, who was appointed to fill Robert F. Kennedy’s seat in 1968, was the last senator to come from outside New York City or its suburbs. That Ms. Gillibrand was an ardent National Rifle Association supporter and a hard-liner on immigration soothed few hurt feelings. (She is more liberal on economic issues, opposing privatizing Social Security; favors a withdrawal from Iraq; and earns high scores from gay and civil liberties groups.)

Ms. Gillibrand, a meticulous student of politics, has crafted her own political adult education course. Mrs. Clinton’s former staff members, inherited by Ms. Gillibrand, made phone calls and churned out memos at a prodigious rate, and Ms. Gillibrand began dialing up congressional representatives and mayors from Rochester to Yonkers to the Bronx.

...

“I didn’t know about milking cows but I quickly informed myself and asked to be on the Agriculture Committee,” Ms. Gillibrand said in an interview late Sunday. “The same thing will happen on immigration issues and gun issues. Now that I am a senator for the whole state I will immerse myself in these issues.

“A lot of these are not issues I thought a lot about before.”

...

Ms. Gillibrand is a mother of two boys, ages 5 years and 8 months. When inquiring about work, home life and the strains of her new job, a reporter notes that he hopes he would ask the same question of an ambitious male politician with young children.

She chuckles.

“You wouldn’t, but that’s O.K.,” she said. “My women friends ask each other these questions all the time.”

...

Her husband, Jonathan, is a venture capitalist and, Ms. Gillibrand said, a close adviser, particularly on fiscal matters. He persuaded her, she said, to vote against the $700 billion rescue for Wall Street banks; she was the only New York Democrat in Congress to vote against the bill. She argued, with some prescience, that the bailout failed to address the banks’ underlying problem, which was not liquidity but insolvency.

“When I was trying to decide how to vote, I asked my husband to read the top 10 economists on this question,” she said. “Then we discussed it at great length.”

...