9/14/00 8:10 a.m.
Lazio’s Night
And not a good one for Hillary.

By Ramesh Ponnuru, NR senior editor

y any reasonable standard, Rick Lazio beat Hillary Rodham Clinton in last night's debate, the first one of the campaign. It's not that she performed badly. But he landed some blows, and she didn't.

His aggressiveness was impressive in itself. Other candidates might have been too intimidated to attack her — because she's a woman; because she's been so widely seen as a pathetic victim of her husband's philandering; because she's the First Lady. Lazio wasn't.

Tim Russert wasn't intimidated, either. His first question concerned Mrs. Clinton's health-care plan of 1993-94 (ouch) and its budget cuts for New York's teaching hospitals (double ouch). Russert quoted his old boss, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (whom both Mrs. Clinton and Lazio want to replace), about how devastating those cuts would have been. Mrs. Clinton danced around the question. Then Lazio went in for the kill. The first words out of his mouth were that no New Yorker would ever have proposed such a plan.

Now of course this was not exactly a conservative critique of Mrs. Clinton; in fact, the cuts for teaching hospitals were one of the few anti-statist aspects of the administration's health-care plan. But Lazio's critique was non-ideological. (In his closing statement, the three achievements Lazio bragged about concerned state action to help disabled people, cancer patients, and tenants of public housing.) Every chance he got, he hit Mrs. Clinton for 1) not being from New York, 2) not having a record, and 3) not having a record of standing up for New York. Mrs. Clinton had no response whenever Lazio spun a Clinton administration initiative as anti-New York.

But Lazio didn't back down when attacked on ideological grounds, either. Mrs. Clinton denounced school vouchers, saying that we "cannot afford to siphon dollars from our underfunded public schools" and should rather concentrate on "what we know works," such as smaller class sizes. Lazio opened his answer by explaining what he would do to improve public schools. Then he quoted Al Gore's comment about being able to understand why some parents would want to have the choice to pull their children out of failing schools and cited polls suggesting that many blacks and Hispanics felt that way. Perfect. (Also the only mention of minorities during the debate. Afterward, Chris Matthews asked Al Sharpton if he were troubled by that, and he allowed that he was.)

Lazio refused to let any charge from Mrs. Clinton go unanswered — he would, unlike her, go back to earlier exchanges to answer them. He was particularly eager to prevent her from linking him to Newt Gingrich, explaining twice that Gingrich wasn't on the ballot. This will probably work. The anti-Newt strategy never worked as well as Democrats think. Gingrich was the least of Bob Dole's problems in 1996 (well, one of the least). The Democrats lost most of the special elections in which they tried to make Newt an issue when he actually was Speaker (ask Republican congressmen Tom Campbell, Heather Wilson, or Vito Fossella about this). The tactic is unlikely to work any better now that Gingrich is the answer to a trivia question. Lazio also sloughed off the accusation that he's a pawn of Gov. George Pataki, who is after all several floors above Gingrich in the polls.

Lazio did, of course, make some missteps. His initial response to the Gingrich linkage was a little too hot. And while he gave much the same answer as Mrs. Clinton to two questions about the upstate economy and the possibility of opening casinos to stimulate it, her emphasis on the area's neediness was probably shrewder politically. A few times, his answers tapered off unimpressively — as did his closing statement.

But Mrs. Clinton fared worse. She clearly did not expect Russert to confront her with a tape of her famous vast-right-wing-conspiracy appearance early in the Lewinsky scandal. (An aside: Nobody mentioned it in the debate, but the clips showed Mrs. Clinton hedging her bets as to whether her husband had in fact had an affair with Lewinsky. She said that nobody would ever "prove" anything and refused to say that it would be more than a matter of "concern" if anything were ever proven.) Nor did she have a good answer to Russert's follow-up question about the propriety of loose charges of conspiracy.

In the last exchange of the evening, Lazio challenged Mrs. Clinton to forswear soft money and independent expenditures on her behalf — noting that he, unlike her, had neither raised nor spent any soft money himself. She had a decent comeback: She demanded that he get signed pledges from all his allies in the vast right-wing conspiracy not to run attack ads against her. But he pressed on, demanding that she sign a pledge he had brought. He walked across the stage, right into her personal space, to present it to her. She tried to call attention to the theatricality of his challenge, saying that she admired his performance. He got back the upper hand instantly by saying he wanted her signature, not her admiration. She threw up her hands. It may as well have been a gesture of surrender.

Does Lazio have any free time to coach George W. Bush?