By ROGER FRANKLIN herald correspondent
NEW YORK - For all the effort she has invested in becoming a jen-u-whine Noo Yarkah, Hillary Clinton appears to have skipped the most vital lesson of a Big Apple education - the city's peculiar ethnic politics.
From a distance, it must have looked so simple to the candidate from Illinois-via-Arkansas-and-Washington: Eat bagels, play salsa music at campaign rallies and kiss the archbishop's ring to impress the Irish and Italians.
As for blacks, they always vote Democrat anyway. A visit with the Rev Al Sharpton and some hot Gospel at Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church should have kept them in the Amen corner.
But as Clinton now knows, the city she hopes to represent in the United States Senate is a turbulent melting pot - one that homegrown politicians recognise as a spitting, seething hazard to any career.
The latest demonstration of ignorance - one hesitates to use "innocence" anywhere near the word "Clinton" - came last week when she was accused of swearing and uttering an anti-Jewish racial slur at her husband's campaign manager all of 26 years ago. The accusation, one of many in a tell-all book about the Clintons' marriage, was ignored in the stuffy New York Times and buried by the pro-Clinton Daily News.
For anybody who shares those papers' kindly disposition towards the Clintons, the book, State of A Union, is easy to dismiss. The author once worked for the National Enquirer, a scurrilous supermarket scandal sheet, and the accusers are a pair of Arkansas back- stabbers with a long history of besmirching their former friends.
But in Rupert Murdoch's rabidly anti-Clinton New York Post, the coverage began with end-of-the-world headlines on the front cover, spilled through two pages inside, and climaxed in a sulfurous editorial assault. After the Post's shock-horror blitz, Clinton had no choice but to put her New York smarts to the test.
Her most garrulous ally, former mayor Ed Koch, advised her to deny and move on. Addressing the accusation would be meshuganah - Yiddish for madness - since it could only keep the issue alive.
By last Monday, the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'brith was vouching for Clinton's love of all humanity, and a posse of rabbis had ridden to the rescue with a statement of support. Koch's advice to ignore the flap, to heave a weary, disgusted sigh and move on, seemed to be working.
But somewhere in the Clinton campaign panic took control and she invited the press to her new suburban home.
Despite her history of denying shocking things that later turn out to be all too true, the display of outraged innocence on the front lawn was a bravura performance, at least as good as the time she depicted her husband's trysts with Monica as counselling sessions for a troubled youngster. Impressive? Indeed! Did it work? Not at all, as Koch had tried to warn her.
The Jewish press accepted that it all happened a long time ago but, while they were on the subject, the same scribblers thought it a good opportunity to raise some other pertinent issues.
Had not Clinton kissed Suhar Arafat, and sat silent while the PLO leader's wife accused Israel of poisoning Palestinian children? Was not she once on the board of a group that provided financial aid to Palestinian groups?
These were issues the Clinton camp thought it had long since put to bed.
Now they were back.
Then, in another miscalculation, her husband called his friend Mortimer Zuckerman, who owns the Daily News. Hillary sure could curse a blue streak, the President admitted. But the notion that she slurred Jews was "crap" from a pair of "losers." Whoops! Another misstep in the Apple's ethnic minefield.
On Harlem's radio stations, black comperes denounced the President for not providing a similarly muscular defence of Jesse Jackson, who has never been allowed to forget that he once called New York "Hymietown."
So far the Irish have not found anything to get upset about, which might be a reason for Hillary to follow the example of Koch, who once pulled off the Triple-i grand slam of ethnic politics.
Taking a vacation from the campaign trail, he touched down first in Israel, then Italy and finally, in Ireland, where he attended Mass and lit a candle to honour the Virgin at the shrine in the town of Nock.
Sure he was Jewish, Koch admitted on his return, but the Virgin would listen because he was the Mayor of New York and that carried a lot of weight, even in Heaven.
Back in New York, an aspiring junior senator shouldnt be so lucky.
Candidate Clinton gets burned in ethnic melting pot
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.