Kirsten Gillibrand’s résumé looks a lot like Hillary Clinton’s: Democrat, lawyer, senator from New York. But lest you think that Gillibrand is just a baggage-free Hillary 2.0 for 2020, witness her recent forum appearance when asked about the man who defeated Clinton for the presidency. “Has he kept any of these promises? No. Fuck no,” the senator said.
Gillibrand’s four-letter Donald Trump taunt got her heaps of attention, and a good deal of scorn from the folks still trying to maintain some sense of decency in American politics (God bless ’em). It was also a sound bite for her recent #resist-friendly moves: endorsing a Medicare-for-all health system, opposing nearly all of Trump’s nominees. It all smells like someone trying to bridge the Clinton and Bernie Sanders wings of the Democratic Party, but when asked about 2020, Gillibrand has said she’s “ruling it out” as she runs for reelection in 2018. Still, things have a way of changing when the White House is involved.
In a little more than a decade in Congress, Gillibrand, 50, has blazed a path that few expected, proving herself a consummate politician willing both to work across the aisle and throw elbows when necessary. She has already racked up an impressive list of legislative successes, including the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” But unlike even Clinton, Gillibrand has expressly pinned her own political future to what might be the true, untapped power in American politics: women. (The senator’s office did not respond to requests for comment.)
"I ALWAYS TRY TO SAY YES, BECAUSE HILLARY SAID YES TO ME."
When the unknown House Democrat was first appointed to fill the Senate seat vacated by Clinton’s departure for the State Department in 2009, it seemed nobody was happy. The same journalists and fellow Democrats who had fawned over Barack Obama’s meteoric rise to the Senate portrayed Gillibrand’s “aggressiveness and self-confidence” as driving her to “vault over older, more experienced politicians.” The blond politico was frequently likened to Tracy Flick, the unctuous, overachieving student council candidate played by Reese Witherspoon in the film Election. And while it’s true, as Gillibrand admits in her 2014 book Off the Sidelines, that the young Tina Rutnik (as she was then known) from Albany, New York, once earned “every imaginable badge” as a Brownie pushing cookies in a local strip mall, that’s pretty much where the similarities to Flick end. Aside, of course, from one thing: In the end, Flick wins. And goes to Washington.
Gillibrand has won too, namely all four congressional campaigns she has run, and she has vaulted over other politicians for good reason: She has out-fundraised, out-messaged and out-fought them, including in her maiden House victory in 2006 for which she raised $2.6 million to oust a heavily favored Republican incumbent. The former corporate lawyer and Dartmouth grad has a folksy but forceful personality, which is as at ease on a farm discussing agricultural policy as it is in a corporate luncheon soliciting donations.