U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a petite woman with pale-blue eyes and perfectly coiffed blonde hair, is sitting at a long table in a huge barn on a farm in upstate New York. There are great sacks of onions piled up to the ceiling on pallets and a few pieces of hulking equipment used during the harvest. It’s a safe bet that this barn has been spiffed up for the senator’s visit, a very special occasion for the family that lives here. It is one of those intoxicating August afternoons—cool and dry with a gentle breeze and big puffy white clouds set against a brilliant blue sky so perfect it seems fake.
This kind of event, when staged by a different sort of politician, one less finely attuned to small-town attitudes, could strike a casual observer as too perfect to be real. But Gillibrand is nothing if not genuine, and through sheer force of personality she bends the occasion to suit her style, which is essentially folksy and earnest. She radiates kindness. But she is also direct and no-nonsense. Despite the fact that she is a Democrat (and a fairly progressive one, at that) and worked for fifteen years as a hotshot Manhattan lawyer, she seems utterly at ease among this crowd of mostly Republican farmers, with their rough hands and weathered faces. Indeed, when she arrived moments earlier—in a plain-Jane beige linen suit and flat shoes—she walked around the room and introduced herself to everyone, including the children, shaking hands and looking everyone directly in the eyes: “Thank you for coming out today.”
She tells the farmers that her goal is to understand their worries and concerns so that she can begin to create a list of New York State’s specific priorities for the farm bill, which will be written in 2012, as it is every five years. They will do most of the talking, she tells them. She is here to listen. And talk they do, with surprising intensity and an impressive fluency in the legislative language of Washington, D.C. Gillibrand studiously takes notes while the farmers talk for nearly an hour—about immigration policy, land conservation, the estate tax, the price of milk. When she does speak, she displays a dazzling mastery of arcane agricultural policy (Gillibrand is the first senator from New York to be on the Senate Agriculture Committee in nearly 40 years). In fact, when she is introduced by Chris Pawelski, the man who owns this farm, he says, “Often when you deal with a member of the Senate, you have to explain the issues in very simple terms. But the senator had an immediate grasp of complex issues; we were able to talk to her in technical terms. Her appointment to fill the rest of Secretary of State Clinton’s term was the best possible choice for farmers in this state.” After an enthusiastic round of applause, Pawelski says, “One final point: We were born one day apart. She is one day older than me.” After a beat, Gillibrand leans into her mic and deadpans, “You will be doing what you’re told,” and everyone laughs.
As the crowd files out of the barn, I express admiration to one of the senator’s aides for his boss’s ability to charm a roomful of Republicans, and he says, “She can do the same thing on derivatives, comfortably rapping about financial markets. She walks into these huge churches in Brooklyn and Queens and starts talking about the asthma rates and the environmental-justice movement. It’s just her comfort level with so many subjects.” This reminds me of something Tina Brown, the editor in chief of The Daily Beast, told me: “People underestimate how smart Senator Gillibrand is. I hosted a dinner for her to meet a number of CEOs and media figures, and in conversation she was brilliant in her analysis of the economic meltdown. And she is an amazing fund-raiser . . . an unstoppable machine when she works the room.”
Doesn’t this all sound strangely familiar? Think back to when Hillary Clinton ran for this very same seat in the Senate ten years ago. The idea was originally met with suspicion, if not downright hostility—and Clinton disarmed a lot of folks with a “listening tour” of upstate New York, patiently visiting every county across the state. She won that election by a comfortable ten-point margin and then put her head down and got to work, charming many of her Senate colleagues on the other side of the aisle with her intelligence, her tirelessness, and her deft ability to work the center of American politics. Six years later, she was reelected in a landslide.
Gillibrand had been sworn in for her second term in Congress (representing the district where she grew up) when she was appointed by New York Governor David Paterson in January 2009 to finish out Clinton’s term. The selection process was a circus that lasted more than two months and culminated in Paterson’s choosing Caroline Kennedy—who then turned down the governor at the last second, which led him to Gillibrand. The appointment was immediately met with suspicion (if not downright hostility) by many downstate New Yorkers. In fact, her situation was, in a funny way, the inverse of Clinton’s—who was perhaps the most famous person ever to run for Senate, whom many felt they already knew (and didn’t like) far too much about.
The name Kirsten Gillibrand was one most people who lived in New York City had never heard, despite the fact that she had run one of the most hard-fought and nasty congressional campaigns in 2006 against an entrenched Republican incumbent, in part by raising an astonishing $2.6 million (she defeated him handily, and The New York Times called her a “dragon slayer”). But once she was picked seemingly out of nowhere, city voters were troubled by, among other things, her 100 percent approval rating by the National Rifle Association. (After her own “listening tour” in Harlem, Gillibrand indicated that she was “flexible” in her stance on gun control.) Many voters also perceived her to be too conservative in her positions on a few other emotional issues, specifically immigration. Indeed, she herself once described her Congressional voting record as “one of the most conservative in the state.” Who was this hick from upstate?
Gillibrand was further burdened by the controversy around her appointment. “I think a lot of people conflated her being picked with the chaos that went around the pick,” says New York Congressman Anthony Weiner. “She was tossed right into that maelstrom, but she handled it the way she has done a lot of things in her career and, from what I gather, in her life: She said, ‘I’m going to try to wear people down by being a good senator and a good person.’ She’s basically outlasted her critics. She’s very Hillaryesque in that regard, in that a lot of the criticism of her at the outset was not so much about her but about what she represented to people through different lenses.”
And, like Clinton, she has since earned the respect of many of her colleagues. Charles Schumer, the senior senator from New York, calls her “a natural,” and when I mention this to Kiki McLean, a senior adviser to Clinton during her presidential campaign, she says, “Yes, but it’s not a phony garrulousness. It’s not back-slapping. She is warm, she is thoughtful. She operates with a quiet confidence.”
I call NBC News chief foreign-affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell, who has interviewed Gillibrand a number of times, and she launches into a story about a fund-raiser softball game that pitted members of Congress against members of the media. “And there was Gillibrand, who I never would have thought of as this tomboy character, and she was pitching. She was the team captain. Just a complete fireplug. There is an athleticism and youthfulness about her. But she kind of defies stereotypes.” Gillibrand’s former colleague House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer goes the furthest in his estimation of her promise. “She is a star. And she is going to be a rising star for a long time to come because she’s so young. We all have a prejudice, men and women: Here is this very attractive blonde woman, and the prejudice is—well, that she’s not a heavyweight. She is a heavyweight. She is going to make a real impact over the years.”
What makes her rise all the more remarkable is that during an election cycle when seemingly every Democrat is in potential trouble, Gillibrand was enjoying a double-digit lead in the polls at press time—her cruise to victory is so taken for granted that The New York Times barely covers her race. “It’s not an accident that this election isn’t that tough for her,” says Schumer. Or as Weiner puts it, “She went through her first several months in office without the benefit of a big electoral win. I think she’s going to finally have it in November. And then she’s off to the races.”
One rainy Sunday morning I meet Gillibrand in Hudson, where she lives, for breakfast at a French café bearing the same name—Le Gamin—as one that originally opened in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood, 120 miles to the south, in the early nineties. It is just one of dozens of businesses along an achingly hip main street in this once-depressed town that have been established over the past several years by city slickers drawn to the cheap rents and slower pace of life. A block away in either direction from where we sit, however, are stubborn pockets of urban blight: abandoned buildings, drug dealers, and a far less wealthy population who are not drinking fair-trade coffee or shopping for $5,000 mid-century sofas. And just a mile beyond downtown, there are working farms and multi-acre properties, not unlike the senator’s spread on a hill right near the Rip Van Winkle Bridge.
In many ways, Hudson encapsulates the fundamental contradiction that is Senator Gillibrand—a small-town girl with rural American values but big-city aspirations—as well as the difficulties inherent in representing the state of New York, one that is largely rural and in some places very Republican but also dominated by the often more urgent needs of New York City, with its rich stew of eight million people, most of whom are Democrats. “Hudson is a microcosm,” say Gillibrand, “which is why I like it. It’s got a lot of the richness and culture and diversity of other parts of the state—but all in one little place.”
It is a truism that once gay men discover a cute town, gentrification is not far behind, and that is certainly the case in Hudson. Their presence is unmistakable. This brings up a fascinating thing about Gillibrand: her very correct gay politics. She is unequivocally supportive of same-sex marriage and has been one of the loudest voices on the effort to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. Should she prevail on November 2, she will, at 43, be the youngest elected member of the Senate. (“She probably has the least senatorial air of any senator I’ve met in eleven years in Congress,” says Weiner.) But her being a post–baby boomer—at the leading edge of the next generation—only partly explains why she is so unconflicted about an issue that seems to trip up even the most progressive politicians, the Clintons and Obama included. I ask her where her passion on this issue comes from, and her answer goes a long way to explaining who Gillibrand is and where she comes from.
“My mother had a lot of gay friends,” she says, in a girly voice that reminds me of Renée Zellweger’s, “and they were very much part of our close circle. And I cared a lot about them. One of my mother’s friends’ partners died of AIDS early on, and that affected me. This man was so interesting, so engaging, was always superkind to me. One of the most handsome men I’d ever met. And it was just such a loss for a young girl to see someone die so young.”
Why, I ask, did your mother have so many gay friends?
Her eyes flicker with joy. “My mother is an amazing woman. She is extremely strong, extremely independent, and she doesn’t mind being different. For example, when she was younger she decided to take karate, and she stuck with it for more than ten years. She would come home with bruises down her arms, and it would distress my sister and me to no end. By the time she stopped, she was a second-degree black belt. That’s the kind of person she is; she finds her own path. She was one of only three women in her law school class. When she was about to give birth to my brother, her due date was the day of her criminal-law final, and her law school professor was so progressive that he said, ‘OK, fine. You do not have to take the exam on the day of your final.’ But he made her take it the next day. From the hospital bed! And she aced the exam.”
Gillibrand’s maternal grandmother was an even feistier role model. Polly Noonan was a legendary figure in Albany politics and an unusually close confidante of Mayor Erastus Corning II, the so-called mayor for life, who ruled Albany from 1942 to 1983. An iconoclast given to salty talk, Noonan organized the secretaries who worked in the state legislature, and over time they became known as “Polly’s Girls.” Later she became the president of the Albany County Women’s Democratic Club. “She empowered two generations of women—hers and my mother’s—to get involved in politics,” says Gillibrand. “As a kid, I literally sat at tables as long as this room where there were 40 women stuffing envelopes.”
When I ask Gillibrand to isolate the most crucial thing she learned from her grandmother, she says, “I was never afraid of politics. I was never afraid of the roughness of it. I was never afraid of using it as a vehicle for social change or for making a difference. I watched her fight for things she believed in. And it was a fight. But she just loved it. She had a belief that she could make a difference and that what she was doing mattered. Most people look at politics as corrupt, as a waste of time, as insincere. I saw a very different side of it.”
Tina Rutnik, as Gillibrand was known for most of her young life (her brother, who could not pronounce Kirsten, came up with the nickname Tina), went to Dartmouth and majored in Asian studies, joined a sorority, played tennis and squash, but did not get involved in student politics. She spent a semester abroad in Beijing and Taiwan and became fluent in Mandarin Chinese. Before attending the UCLA School of Law, she interned for then–Republican senator Alfonse D’Amato, a longtime friend of Gillibrand’s father, Douglas Rutnik, an attorney and lobbyist (her parents divorced when she was 22). She passed the bar in 1991 and went to work for the law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell, where the seeds of her future life in electoral politics were planted: She joined the fledging Women’s Leadership Forum, a fund-raising organization; and then Hillary Clinton, as First Lady, came to New York and spoke to the group.
“She was trying to encourage us to become more active in politics,” says Gillibrand, “and she said, ‘If you leave all the decision-making to others, you might not like what they do, and you will have no one but yourself to blame.’ It was such a challenge to the women in the room. And it really hit me: She’s talking to me.” Around that time Clinton gave her famous speech in Beijing. “Remember when she said, ‘Human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights’? That speech affected me very deeply. I was just a young lawyer thinking, What am I doing with my life? What am I doing with my career? As I watched her on that stage I thought, Why aren’t I there? It was so poignant for me. And that’s what made me figure out how to get involved in politics.”
Here is something you don’t see every day: a United States senator, looking like a million bucks in a little black dress and high heels, jitterbugging in a Manhattan department store. It could mean only one thing: Fashion’s Night Out. It is a Friday night in early September, and Gillibrand is at the Elie Tahari boutique at Saks, the first of her three stops through the mad crush that has taken over the city, when the music gets cranked and a group of professional dancers take the floor. One of the guys grabs Gillibrand’s hand, and she gamely heads to the dance floor and begins to cut it up like a seasoned pro (all those gay friends!). Her gracefulness is striking. But it also highlights something else: Gillibrand is loose and fun. She was branded a Tracy Flick not long after she was appointed to the Senate, which is to say a humorless drudge whose ruthless ambition knows no limit, but that is not what I saw during the four days I spent with her. Once, when we had only fifteen minutes to grab lunch, one of her aides asked me what I wanted to eat; they would call in the order so it would be ready the minute we arrived. I asked for a mushroom omelet. As we sat down to eat, I took a bite, and Gillibrand looked at me with a smile and asked, “How’s your omelet?” I said, “Delicious,” and she said, “I added Swiss cheese. I thought it would taste much better.” Another time, after the end of a long day of campaigning upstate, everyone was exhausted. Still, she asked if I wanted to grab a coffee and talk. We found a little country store with a couple of tables inside, where we chatted for nearly an hour, during which she told some very funny off-the-record stories about her more hapless male colleagues in the House, employing a bit of the salty talk her grandmother was known for.
At her next stop for Fashion’s Night Out, the BCBGMaxAzria store in midtown, she amiably chats with Max Azria. When a young fan approaches the designer to tell him how obsessed she is with his clothing, Gillibrand grabs the girl’s iPhone, pushes the two of them together, and snaps off a few shots for the girl, who walks away giggling with delight. Her last stop of the evening is Nanette Lepore on Madison Avenue. I arrive before Gillibrand, and when she walks in I notice that she has changed into a different little black dress—a Nanette Lepore—and a different pair of heels. “We had the fitting for her on Saturday,” says Jennifer Pinto, who does PR and marketing for Lepore. “I’ve done a lot of fittings but never with a senator. You know, skirt length, heel height, cleavage. Let’s just say there are different . . . rules. Such a time warp in Washington.”
As modern and young as Gillibrand is, this is one part of her job that remains fuddy-duddy; it seems unlikely that she will blaze a daring fashion path on Capitol Hill. Which is too bad because these days, she could pull it off, having lost a lot of weight since she became senator. I first ask her about it back in August over breakfast in Hudson. How much did you lose?
“Should I tell you? Really?”
I really want to know.
“Can I tell you off the record?” she says.
“The readers of Vogue will want to know this,” I say.
“Oh, all right,” she says. “I will tell you. I lost over 40 pounds. When I was pregnant with Theo, I gained 20 pounds and didn’t lose it. And then with my second pregnancy I gained another 20 pounds. When I finished nursing Henry last summer, I thought, I have to get back in shape. I want to be healthy and fit and play sports again. So I started on a very strict diet, played tennis, and over a year, my goal was to lose my pregnancy weight, and I’ve just done it.”
Are you back in all your skinny clothes?
“I am going to recommend this to your readers,” she says, laughing. “I had saved all my 4s and 6s from before I had children, but when I started this diet I said, ‘I’m going to give away all my clothes because I want to start fresh’ and I wanted to reward myself; if I ever get back to that size, I can buy new clothes. I gave away every stitch of clothing that I was not wearing. I started at a size 16, and now I am back at a 4/6.”
Kiki McLean pointedly tells me that one of the things that she most admires about Gillibrand is “the way she balances being a senator with her husband and her little boys.” As much as I hate to make too much of it, I said, I can’t help being impressed by somebody who lost 40 pounds while doing this job. “OK,” says McLean, “this is a killer because I have fought weight my entire life, and she is completely disciplined about this. She was at my home for dinner recently, and she focused on the salad and the fruit. We can laugh about it and I can be jealous of her, but I think it’s a tremendous demonstration of discipline and the fact that she knows she has to be in the best health, so that she can be the best mom and the best senator.”
And no doubt remain attractive to her husband of nine years, who is two years younger than she is. Jonathan Gillibrand, a British venture capitalist, met his future wife on a blind date when she was a lawyer and he was getting an MBA at Columbia. “I thought he was one of the nicest and kindest people I’d ever met,” says the senator. “That’s what charmed me.” He’s been supportive of her career and at times offers strategic advice, though he keeps the less savory aspects of electoral politics at arm’s length. “Not many husbands want their wives to be in politics, because it’s intense,” she says. “The only thing he doesn’t like is when I’m attacked. He gets very upset.”
On the Sunday morning after Fashion’s Night Out, I take a cab out to Queens to join Gillibrand and her staff as they make their way through outer-borough New York City. I find her sitting in the last pew of Mount Moriah AME, a modern church with big video screens, live music, and an even livelier congregation. Gillibrand follows the Reverend Robert Lowe and, to my surprise, keys off his over-the-top style and gets a little gospel-preachy herself, talking about the Joshua generation not being able to get into the Promised Land, risin’ up with one voice and shoutin’ down the walls of Jericho. Before she is done there are a couple of shout-outs to Gillibrand from the pews—“That’s right!”—and she leaves the stage to a very warm round of applause. Our next stop is the famous Mother AME Zion church in Harlem, where a very similar scene plays out, Gillibrand thundering from the pulpit with even more gusto. When she comes down from the altar, Virginia Montague, president of the New York Coalition of One Hundred Black Women, says to her, “Well, if you ever decide to give up politics, you could be a preacher. You’ve got a real message.” To which Gillibrand replies, “I always thought about it, but I was raised Catholic, and in the Catholic Church, they don’t let women speak.”
A short while later, we are standing in a supermarket in midtown Manhattan where Gillibrand has just given a press conference on food safety. We have a few idle moments, and she comes over to chat as we stand in the produce aisle. All that talk in church about “shouting down the walls of Jericho,” I ask her—is that how she sees politics?
“I think faith transformed my interest in politics into a calling for service,” she says. “I think it’s metaphorical . . . to actually raise your voice. But you have to really fight hard. Just as I was talking to you about trying to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. It takes enormous effort. Nothing happens in Washington unless you really push—push your colleagues, push the White House, push the leadership. You don’t have to necessarily do it in an aggressive way. You can do it in a very kind way. But people need to know it’s important to you. It’s the belief in something that can make the difference in winning the debate. They need to know that you care.”
At one point Gillibrand told me that one reason she thinks there are still not that many women in politics is that “very few women want to be in a profession where you will have an opponent who says mean things about you every day, where the news may not be fair on a given day. It’s such an adversarial profession.” This struck me at the time as the sort of thing that Hillary Clinton would never say. Standing in the supermarket, I bring this up again. “You have to remember,” she says, “that most women are the protectors of their family. They look out for not only children but also the elderly. A lot of women, we see that as our first job. Many women don’t want to expose their family or their children to something so rough and so aggressive and unfair and not honest.”
Why are you able to tough it out?
“Because I had all the tools I needed!” she says. “You don’t have to take it personally. It’s like playing a sport that’s a little rough.”
As if on cue, an attractive, stylish middle-aged woman approaches Gillibrand to thank her for running. “I would never run for public office,” the woman says. “The scrutiny! The criticism! The blame! It’s a tremendously courageous thing to do. It’s a tremendous commitment. Thank you. Good luck.”
At which point U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand shoots me a mock-smug look that says: Exhibit A. I rest my case.
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