Dawn of new era for Clintons

WASHINGTON - A smiling Hillary Clinton, trying hard not to look too triumphant or too excited, was yesterday sworn in as the junior Senator from New York, becoming the first First Lady to assume elected office and the first woman Senator to represent the state of New York.

Her husband - President for a further 17 days - became a common citizen for the morning, arriving with their daughter Chelsea to join other families of new senators in the visitors' gallery.

There was a palpable sense of anticipation in the Senate Chamber as noon approached.

Mrs Clinton, accompanied by her husband and daughter, had been driven from the White House in an unmarked car about half an hour beforehand, followed closely by the security detail that will continue to protect her as a former First Lady.

It would be hard to conceive of a more graphic tableau of the end of one Clinton era - with all its big dramas and small ironies - and perhaps the start of a new one. There was Hillary Clinton in the well of the Senate, one of 11 new Senators taking the oath of office.

There in the gallery was the President, looking proudly down on the wife he backed to the hilt professionally, but personally betrayed.

And there in the chair, making his first public appearance since his handshake with the man who beat him for the right to succeed Bill Clinton in the White House, sat Vice-President Al Gore.

Visibly relaxed and beaming, Gore acknowledged a vote of thanks from an erstwhile arch-enemy, Senate Republican leader Trent Lott, and the standing ovation that followed. Hillary Clinton was in the third group of Senators - those re-elected and those newly elected - to take the oath.

The scene in the Chamber was a far cry from the last time the paths of the Clintons and Senate crossed.

As the family and a majority of Senators doubtless recalled, it was only two years before that the same Chamber had tried (and acquitted) the new Senator's husband in absentia for lying under oath.

Nor did the perversities of history end there. Gore, whose long political career may well end with the Clinton presidency, holds the casting vote in a Senate that is now balanced 50-50, placing the Democrats in the majority until George W. Bush becomes President.

This unprecedented situation has spawned an unseemly and very public battle between the parties over how such a Senate will work.

The Democrats want equal representation on committees and an equal number of chairmanships because of the 50-50 split; Republicans are resisting any change.

- HERALD CORRESPONDENT

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