Speechless in Ramallah

Hillary Clinton’s senatorial campaign advisers had a punch-drunk air of disbelief about them this week as they struggled to absorb the fallout from their candidate’s disastrous visit last week with Mrs. Yasser Arafat in the West Bank town of Ramallah.

It wasn’t enough that Clinton sat in polite silence while the Palestinian first lady delivered a luridly anti-Israel diatribe. Afterward, the candidate had to go give Arafat a kiss on the cheek as the cameras whirred. New York’s tabloids milked it for days with banner headlines like “Shame on Hillary” and — in a useful bit of advice to Mrs. Arafat’s husband — “Muzzle Tov.” It made friend and foe wonder: What was the first lady thinking?

For the record, campaign aides said it was one big non-event, an excuse for yet another round of Clinton-bashing. Their boss, they insisted, had been genuinely distressed by Suha Arafat’s unexpected rant about Israel’s supposed use of “poison gas” on Palestinian women and children. But as first lady, Clinton had to restrain herself so as not to undermine the peace process. She waited a day before voicing her displeasure, and then spoke in measured, diplomatic tones. Surely the voters will applaud her restraint, the aides said.

Privately, though, Clinton’s advisers were tearing their hair out. As they studied the landscape, it became clear that the damage was real. True, many voters, perhaps even most, may welcome Clinton’s diplomatic restraint. But some won’t and they could be numerous enough to hand the election to Clinton’s Republican rival, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. At the very least, she’s given her foes a potent weapon to use against her over the coming year.

“It was a great week for the Hillary-bashers,” said one senior campaign adviser. “But the election is still a year away. This was a lesson. Hopefully she’ll learn it.” But maybe she won’t.

In the simplest sense, Clinton’s Ramallah gaffe hurt her with Jewish voters. Jews are 12 percent to 15 percent of New York voters, but they play a bigger role. Conventional wisdom says a Democrat needs two-thirds of the Jewish vote to win statewide office. That’s been true for a half-century. Before her Middle East trip Clinton was polling just under half.

She needs to win over another 20 percent of the wavering Jewish vote. That fragment, the Jewish swing vote, is not solidly Democratic or Republican. It picks candidates in large part over questions of Jewish safety. When a Palestinian accuses Israel of poisoning children, those voters expect a firm reply. “If a politician can’t defend Jews against blood libels, what are they there for?” said a senior official with a Jewish organization in New York.

Clinton was already vulnerable among Jewish swing voters because of her 1998 endorsement of Palestinian statehood. Now she’s been captured kissing Suha Arafat on tape, to be rerun endlessly next year. She’s in real trouble.

“She could theoretically make up the difference among minorities or women,” says pollster Lee Miringoff of New York’s Marist Institute for Public Opinion Research. “But right now she’s doing badly across the board.”

A year is a long time in politics. Giuliani could make a big mistake in the coming months. But few political insiders expect it — at least not on the Israel issue, Clinton’s weak point right now. Hawkish Jews have been one of Giuliani’s strongest support bases since he entered electoral politics.

He’s still remembered for throwing Yasser Arafat out of a United Nations 50th anniversary gala in 1995. His tough-guy persona perfectly matches the fearful mood of Jewish swing voters.

Beyond numbers, though, it’s likely that the most serious fallout from the Ramallah gaffe will be among Clinton’s own core supporters: Democratic loyalists and liberal activists. By letting herself get caught on stage during an anti-Semitic-sounding tirade, and then failing to respond for a full day, Clinton damaged her reputation for political savvy. Even members of her own campaign staff were questioning her political judgment this week. That won’t be easy to rebuild.

From the outset, Clinton’s Senate candidacy has been an experiment. No first lady has run for office from the White House before. Nobody knows what it means or how it works.

Critics have warned all year that mixing the two roles would set up impossible conflicts, to the detriment of both. Clinton’s defenders insisted she could pull it off, because she had the political instincts and skills to navigate that kind of obstacle course.

Last week’s Middle East trip was the first laboratory test. The results seem clear-cut. Candidacy and first ladyhood don’t mix. If Clinton hadn’t been first lady, she wouldn’t have had to meet with Suha Arafat, a loose cannon who regularly embarrasses Palestinian leaders and feuds publicly with her husband. On the other hand, if Clinton hadn’t been a candidate, her being ambushed by Arafat wouldn’t have been nearly as dramatic or newsworthy. A first lady can dust herself off and move on. A candidate has to prove her mettle.

Most important, aides say, if Clinton hadn’t been first lady she wouldn’t have had to follow the advice of White House national security aides and refrain from criticizing Arafat to her face. She was hobbled, staffers say, by the fact that her entire campaign staff had been left behind in New York. They would have told her to hit back fast and hard. But that argument — she couldn’t make an intelligent decision because she had the wrong advisers — simply reinforces doubts about Clinton’s own political smarts.

“There’s always been a question of her political savvy,” says one Democratic activist with close ties to the Clinton White House. “There was Whitewater and Travelgate. Last month there was the issue of the campaign ads she paid for with soft money. Now this. The bottom line is, does this woman have a political bone in her body?”

So shaken was Clinton’s image this week that some of her closest advisers were reduced to defending her candidacy on the grounds that she’s Democrat.

“There are real differences between the parties, and it makes a difference whether Jesse Helms or Joe Biden chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,” said one well-known Clinton adviser this week. “I think the country as a whole has a stake in that.”

A strong argument if you’re a Democrat. But, as another campaign adviser said, “If that’s the argument we’re presenting at this stage in the campaign, we’re in bigger trouble than I thought.”

J.J. Goldberg writes a weekly column for the Jewish Journal.