Hillary Rodham Clinton Is an Opponent’s Dream

If Hillary Rodham Clinton formally enters the New York Senate race against New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, it will be the first time she’ll stand square in the sights as a candidate and thus be forced to respond directly to all charges flung at her along the campaign trail.

It’s true that she’s been the target of investigation before, but the venues of combat have been depositions, a grand jury session and one appearance before Congress to justify her health program, where the legislators treated her with ermine gloves. Besides, Bill has always been the numero uno target.

So what are her immediate vulnerabilities, after seven years of close scrutiny?

Remember, 80% to 90% of the Whitewater scandal had HRC’s fingerprints all over it. She was the corporate lawyer who finagled the lucrative land deals and mortgage arrangements. It was the billing records from that phase of the Clintons’ property operations that first went missing and finally came to light in HRC’s private White House quarters.

Hillary’s riposte on such matters will no doubt be that she and Bill have emerged unscathed from the most ferocious scrutiny in American investigative history, by Ken Starr and his team. But Starr never did issue a report on Whitewater, although HRC apparently narrowly escaped indictment for alleged perjury committed in the course of her grand jury deposition testimony in connection with the case. Hickman Ewing was handling this aspect of Whitewater for the Starr probe. He found that HRC was safe under the statute of limitations but vulnerable to a perjury rap.

In the end Starr didn’t choose to indict, but HRC may not be quite out of these particular woods yet. Her erstwhile partner at the Rose Law Firm, Webster L. Hubbell, has had Starr’s charges restored against him by a federal appeals court and faces trial on the matter of whether he was bribed into silence when he got highly lucrative consultancy fees after he’d left the Justice Department and, in some cases, after he’d been originally indicted. This Hubbell trial is set to start in August, and HRC will obviously be a prime focus of the prosecutor and the press.As a corporate lawyer, Hillary Clinton has plenty of unwholesome skeletons rattling in the closet, quite aside from Whitewater. The Rose Law Firm was not a charitable institution. Her firm’s work in the sale of the Beverly nursing home chain is perhaps something that Giuliani’s researchers will take a passing interest in, since the sale handled by Rose Law did leave a number of old folks facing higher fees and was exactly the sort of “unconscionable profiteering” that Clinton herself later accused the health industry of doing.

Then there was the LaFarge cement and incineration business on whose board Hillary Clinton sat. Any third-party Green candidate might take an interest in the polluting conduct of this enterprise. And as HRC tries to muster the support of labor unions, Giuliani will perhaps evoke her years on the Wal-Mart board, a company not noted for the proud union tradition of Gompers and Debs.

There’s also the matter of Clinton’s inexplicable enrichment, the manner in which, under the kindly guidance of Jim Blair, chief corporate counsel for Tyson Foods, and also of the futures magician Robert L. “Red” Bone, Hillary’s modest investment of $1,000 in cattle futures bloated up to the $100,000 level.

More unsettled business comes in the form of Travelgate, another chapter in the Starr investigation. Starr did say nothing impeachable had come out of his Travelgate probe, so far as Bill was concerned. But Bill was a peripheral figure in that affair. Hillary was at the heart.

Suppose Clinton accuses Giuliani of violating civil rights or of having about his person the aroma of the police state. Now imagine the righteous prosecutorial finger of Rudy Giuliani pointing straight back at Hillary Clinton, reminding her and the voters of New York of Filegate. Once again, HRC has been accused of bringing on board D. Craig Livingstone--who amassed several hundred files on enemies of the Clintons (who knows, maybe even on Rudy himself)--to head up White House security.

Hillary Clinton will defend herself from all charges of scandal by deploring these souvenirs of Starr’s long and costly effort to beat down Bill Clinton. She will insist that Giuliani concentrate on substance. But her own record on substance isn’t so hot. Her supervision of health reform in 1994 ended in debacle. And although she doubtless will be offering herself as a friend of the poor and downtrodden, evoking her work as board member of Marian Wright Edelman’s Children’s Defense Fund, the dismantling of the welfare system that is occurring on the Clintons’ watch is perhaps not an achievement she will want to boast about. After all, Peter Edelman, Marian’s husband, resigned from Health and Human Services in protest.

Oh, Hillary has taken one principled stand--on Palestinian rights, and Giuliani has lost no time in reminding New York voters of this.