At a rally in the tiny Hudson Valley town of Sand Lake in 2006, a youthful long-shot New York Democratic congressional candidate with a tongue-twister of a married name, Kirsten Gillibrand, praised the political leader who had inspired her. "Senator Clinton is a role model for many Americans," Gillibrand declared, gesturing to the woman in a black pantsuitand turquoise blouse standing next to her. Gillibrand—who was wearing a black pantsuit with a white blouse—recalled a speech that Clinton had given as first lady: "She said, `If you don't participate, you're going to leave it to those who do. And you may not like what you find.'"

Gillibrand (that's Jill-uh-brand), then the mother of a three-year-old son, was implicitly referring to her own decision to jettison a comfortable life as a partner in the Albany office of blue-chip law firm Boies, Schiller & Flexner to take on a four-term GOP incumbent in a solidly Republican upstate New York district that George W. Bush had won two years earlier. (She pulled off the upset after newspaper reports revealed that incumbent John Sweeney's wife had summoned the police in a domestic dispute.) Known to the world as Tina Rutnik until she dropped her childhood nickname and then married in 2001 (her British husband, Jonathan Gillibrand, is a financial consultant), Gillibrand is the granddaughter of Polly Noonan, a fabled political figure who was a behind-the-scenes power in Albany politics for more than 40 years. But even at Gillibrand's most optimistic (and there is an unmistakable sunniness to her), even at her most ambitious (the favored adjective of her critics), this fledgling candidate could not have imagined the speed of her moon-launch ascent in national politics. A little more than two years after that Sand Lake rally, the 42-year-old Gillibrand was not just another blond Hillary ­Clinton clone—she was holding the very seat in the U.S. ­Senate that Clinton had vacated with her appointment as President Barack Obama's secretary of state.

Now the Senate's youngest member, Gillibrand can boast of a career arc which, like that of her mentor, breaks the traditional mold for national political success: toiling gradually through the unglamorous ranks, like Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill (state legislature, county prosecutor, two terms as state auditor), New Hampshire's Jeanne Shaheen (state legislature and three terms as governor), and North Carolina's Kay Hagan (10 years in the state senate). Gillibrand also has defied the stereotype that women candidates—aside from the already famous—have trouble raising money; she collected a staggering $7.3 million in her two House campaigns. As Ellen Malcolm, the founder of the women's Democratic fundraising group EMILY's List, says admiringly about Gillibrand, "Nobody ever would have taken her race seriously if it hadn't been for her tenacious work raising money."

But what makes Gillibrand among the most intriguing and ­potentially one of the most formidable female politicians in America is how she vaulted into the Senate in January—and her trial by fire once she won membership in the most exclusive club in America. Competing against an A-list cast that included a Kennedy (Caroline) and a Cuomo (Andrew), along with virtually every big-name Democrat in New York, Gillibrand succeeded in her stealth campaign to persuade Governor David Paterson to ­appoint her as Clinton's successor. Gillibrand's hidden strength was that she seemingly was an unobjectionable vanilla—friendly with the Clintons (as a New York lawyer she raised money for Hillary's 2000 Senate campaign), blessed with an upstate pedigree (New York City's outsize influence on state politics is resented north of its suburbs), and deferential toward Chuck Schumer, New York's senior Democratic senator. "Everyone whose nose was involved in this felt comfortable with her," says Gillibrand's father, Doug Rutnik, a politically wired lawyer-lobbyist in Albany. "So that's how the politics went. Every moon there possibly was was aligned."

But as soon as Gillibrand was anointed to the shock of nearly everyone in politics, the New York City newspapers wrote a new horoscope for her with the moons in all the wrong places. Stories detailing Gillibrand's two-year congressional record gave liberal critics ammunition to depict this sophisticated Ivy League achiever (who spent nearly a decade living in Manhattan as a young lawyer) as a culturally insensitive upstate Sarah Palin who thinks that subway is a sandwich chain. Desperately recalibrating some of her parochial issue positions (pro-gun, anti–gay marriage, and tough on immigration) to reflect her new constituency, Gillibrand came across as a convictionless flip-flopper—not exactly the best image for a candidate who has to actually run in 2010 to hang on to her seat. The headline on a New York Times news story in February captured the can't-win-whatever-you-do trap that the new senator seemed to find herself in: "To Some in Gillibrand's Old District, Her Evolution Is a Betrayal." Caught in the withering spotlight of the New York media (a Daily News column in April was titled "The Making of a Rubber Stamp"), Gillibrand endured a maladroit political rollout that brought back memories of Palin ­being interviewed by Katie Couric. Judging from the statewide polls (troubling for Gillibrand), New Yorkers were seemingly grumbling, "This is the senator we got instead of Caroline Kennedy?"

Then with the help of patrons like Schumer (who is particularly influential because he directed the game-changing 2006 and 2008 national Senate campaigns that brought the Democrats from minority status to close to a filibuster-proof majority) and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel (who ran the Democratic House campaign committee that aided Gillibrand in 2006), the new junior senator began to turn the tide. Reporters' e-mail in-boxes were flooded with joint press releases like "Schumer, Gillibrand Announce Over $35,000 to Support Medical Services in the Southern Tier." The White House tried to clear the field for Gillibrand in 2010: President Barack Obama himself telephoned Long Island Congressman Steve Israel to press him to abandon plans to challenge Gillibrand in a primary race. "Gillibrand brings a lot to the table," says a top Democratic strategist. "A big one is her ability to raise money." What we are witnessing in Gillibrand is how a young woman politician uses the same backroom skills that have aided her male counterparts since the dawn of the republic.

As a national political reporter, I spent two days traveling with Gillibrand in October 2006, when there were the first glimmers that she could win her quixotic House race. What struck me at the time were Gillibrand's nerve, her infectious laugh, her fundraising prowess, and her say-nothing-spontaneous caution with the press. Advised by Howard Wolfson, Hillary Clinton's longtime media handler, Gillibrand seems to have embraced the former first lady's bland-is-better political style without having been blessed with Clinton's dramatic backstory. As Maury Thompson, a reporter for The Post-Star in Glens Falls, New York, who has covered Gillibrand since her first congressional foray in 2005, puts it, "During the campaign, it got to the point that I could write down what she was going to say before she said it. It wasn't insincerity but just a great ability to manage her message."

This time, my first interview with Gillibrand, in mid-May, ­begins in the least threatening way imaginable: looking at a ­photo album, offered by her press secretary, featuring the senator's two ­beguiling sons, five-year-old Theo and Henry, who will be ­celebrating his first birthday with his parents this evening. Sniffling from a cold she caught from her boys and curled up on the edge of a canary yellow sofa in the Senate office she inherited from Clinton, Gillibrand seems to revel in chattering about safe topics. All it takes, for example, is a simple reportorial question to reduce her to giggles: Have you figured out how to handle child care as you run statewide in New York?

When Gillibrand, in 2008, became only the sixth congresswoman in history to give birth while in office, she and her ­husband, Jonathan, assumed that they'd keep their schedule of living with their two sons in Washington, DC, during the week and then on weekends flying to their home in Hudson, New York, in her district. But now she's spending parts of her weekends in far-flung places like Brooklyn, Binghamton, and Buffalo rather than just grabbing a flight to Albany, and this peripatetic life (she gets home to Hudson only about once a month) is certain to continue through the 2010 campaign.

"I'm still trying to figure it out as I go along," Gillibrand finally says in response to the child-care question. "It's so important as a parent to put your children first. But you figure out, as a working parent, how to be working and a parent at the same time." Gillibrand concedes that Theo misses the regularity of his weekly trips home. "Theo would like to be in Hudson more," she says, "because all of his cousins are there, and he gets to see my mom and dad. But now that he's in school [in DC], he actually has friends here, too."

As Gillibrand sips tea from a Styrofoam cup, she tells what she calls the "crazy story" of how she became a senator. When rumors began to swirl that Clinton would be appointed secretary of state, reporters started speculating about whom the governor would appoint as her successor. Despite New York's reputation as a cauldron of feminism, there were comparatively few women holding major political office (no statewide elected officials other than Clinton, and only seven out of 29 House members). So because of gender and her fundraising track record, Gillibrand's name popped up, albeit near the bottom of long lists. She says that she asked her husband, "Jon, what do you think about this? Do you think we should put our names in?" It is telling that Gillibrand, in her choice of the pronoun "we," underscores what a partnership her marriage appears to be, with Jonathan, for example, relocating to Washington to reduce the child-care pressures on the family.

In December, Gillibrand had a one-hour interview with Paterson that was so hush-hush that she even kept it secret from her mother. "I came to Albany, went to her house, and had a cup of tea," Gillibrand recalls, saying only, "I have a couple of meetings, Ma." She explains, "I didn't want to get anyone's hopes up, ­because I felt it was a 5 percent chance at best." During her interview with Paterson, Gillibrand stressed her two winning House races ("I'm not only tested, but I've done it") and her willingness to "be a complement for Senator Schumer." But perhaps Gillibrand's major accomplishment during that interview (the only face-to-face meeting she had with him) was that—unlike some of her rivals—she listened to the governor's instructions to keep a low profile and not campaign for the job.

"When the advice was to do nothing," Gillibrand says, "that's probably the hardest advice in the world for me to take because I'm such a doer. I want to make a thousand calls." But Gillibrand, who endured the brutal hours as an associate in the corporate law firm of Davis Polk, also understands the virtues of pleasing those who have power over your fate. So while rivals were meeting with reporters in places like Buffalo and dropping in on local officials in Watertown, Gillibrand went on a two-week Christmas vacation to London with her family. "Then we came back," Gillibrand says, "and everyone is lobbying for the job, everyone is traveling the state—and I'm just keeping my head down." About the most overt thing Gillibrand says she did was to glide over to Paterson at a party during the inaugural festivities in Washington and say, "Hi. If you need any recommendations, let me know." Less than 72 hours after Obama placed his left hand on the Bible to take the oath of office, Paterson called Gillibrand at 2 a.m. (following an earlier lengthy late-night phone conversation with her) to say the magic words, "Let's do this."

Part of the ensuing firestorm was the fault of Paterson, an unelected governor himself (he succeeded the disgraced Eliot Spitzer), who tantalized New Yorkers with the star-studded choice of Caroline Kennedy before turning on JFK's daughter at the last minute through a series of disdainful leaks to the press. With every Democrat in New York—with the possible exception of Bill Clinton—angling for the appointment, there was a sense of bafflement, belittlement, and bruised egos when Paterson tapped the junior legislator unknown outside of Albany. The hapless Paterson and his staff also allowed former Republican Senator Al D'Amato—a political friend of Gillibrand's father, but about as popular among New York Democrats as Rush Limbaugh—to wiggle into the center of the picture onstage as Gillibrand gave an impressively long (25 minutes) and impressively bland ("I look for ways to find common ground between upstate and downstate") acceptance speech. As Gillibrand explains, "The problem was that most people in the state didn't know me...so when political opponents were sending out negative press releases the day I was announced, [D'Amato's presence] was something they could draw on."

D'Amato's Kodak moment should have remained a glitch. But it played into something larger: exaggerated concerns that the new senator was a closet conservative. Gillibrand's votes in Congress were aligned with the northeastern Democratic mainstream with two double-barreled exceptions: guns and immigration. From her rhetoric (describing herself in a newspaper interview as "very pro–Second Amendment") to her voting record (earning a 100 percent rating from the National Rifle Association), Gillibrand sharply deviated from the antigun orthodoxy of urban New York politicians, from NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg on down. Long ­Island Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy—who entered politics after a crazed gunman killed her husband on a commuter train—immediately ­began talking about challenging Gillibrand in the 2010 Senate primary (she eventually abandoned her threat).

Even more incendiary amid the multiethnic politics of New York City (more than one third of its 8 million residents was born in foreign countries) was Gillibrand's consistent pattern of voting with House conservatives on immigration, including backing legislation to make English the country's official national language. The Spanish-language newspaper El Diario ran a front-page picture of Gillibrand with the sneering headline "Anti Inmigrante." And Peter Rivera, an influential Hispanic state legislator from the Bronx, accused the new senator of having a record that "borders on xenophobia." Gillibrand has never explicitly said that she adopted these positions to placate her old congressional district, which is 95 percent white, is largely rural, and hugs the eastern border of New York from Connecticut to Vermont. But her vague words on the topic can be parsed to point to this conclusion: "Now that I represent the whole state and I represent these very different constituencies with very different needs, it is incumbent upon me to create legislative solutions," she says.

Week after week of negative press cast a predictable pall over Gillibrand's approval ratings. It's not an exaggeration to say that there are two major groups of New York voters: those who have no impression of their new senator (43 percent in a statewide Marist College poll in early May) and those who disapprove of Gillibrand's performance in office (38 percent gave her job ratings of either "fair" or "poor" in the same survey). These dismal numbers reflect more than Republicans blowing off steam: 35 percent of registered Democrats described Gillibrand's first four months in office as fair or poor.

This was not the career arc that Gillibrand, a practicing Catholic, had in mind when she confided to her younger sister, Erin, before entering the 2006 congressional race, "I want to do more. If I died and went to heaven right now, God would say to me, `You should have done more.' "

Kirsten Gillibrand, aka Tina Rutnik, was born into a clan of doers. "Our family is very matriarchal," says her mother, Polly Rutnik, a retired lawyer. "There have been very, very strong women." No one exemplified this better than her grandmother Polly Noonan, the closest confidante (and perhaps even more) to Albany Mayor Erastus Corning, who served for a staggering four decades until his death in 1983. "Literally, my grandmother knew which family needed a turkey at Thanksgiving, which kid needed shoes, which dad needed a job," Gillibrand recalls. "And the job of the party was to provide it—and that's how they built allegiance."

Despite her grandmother's presence in her life on a daily basis, Gillibrand grew up in 1970s Albany curiously detached from the substance of national politics. As Gillibrand's sister, Erin Tschantret (a former ­actress who, incidentally, is ­probably the only senatorial sibling who operates a pirate ship, in Baltimore Harbor no less), recalls, "There was no political gossip. We were involved in politics only as a social event. I remember being in my grandmother's basement ­doing a mailing for Erastus Corning. But we never talked about politics, even presidential politics." Elaine ­Bartley—Gillibrand's close friend "since we were in playpens together"—­underscores this: "Politics was not something that she focused on early in life. It was in the background.

As near as can be deciphered through the mists of the memories of protective family and friends, Gillibrand had an old-fashioned happy childhood, especially after she began attending the nearby ­exclusive girls' prep school, Emma Willard, as a day student. "On any given weekend," recalls her father, "we could have five to 10 girls at the house because Tina didn't want to leave anybody alone in the dorm on the weekend." There's a warm tenor to these recollections. "My fondest memories of Tina are that I played on the soccer team with her and we skied all winter," says Jennifer Whalen, who has been a friend since the ninth grade at Emma Willard. Polly ­Rutnik, who practiced law with her husband until their divorce in the early 1990s, says, "I don't think I ever told any of my children that they couldn't do something, other than maybe take a road trip in the middle of winter or drink beer or something. I can never, ever remember restricting them if they wanted to try something new. That's how I got an actress and a senator." In ­exchange, the two girls got a mother who, during one Thanksgiving, had personally killed with a bow and arrow or shot with a rifle every piece of meat on the table—wild boar, turkey, and (shades of Palin) a moose. Despite her gun-totin' mama, Gillibrand has never gone hunting, though she has shot skeet.

Even as a teenager Gillibrand had a sense of direction, as Bartley stresses: "Kirsten has the unique ability to figure out how to accomplish a task." Some of that discipline may have come from competitive sports; ­Gillibrand played varsity tennis at Emma Willard and squash at Dartmouth. As an Asian studies major at Dartmouth, she spent six months in Taiwan and China, and was, she says, sufficiently fluent in Mandarin that "I could talk to anyone and read a newspaper." Even Gillibrand's rusty ­remnants of Mandarin are an unusual and useful political skill in New York City, where about 3 percent of the voters are ­Chinese-American.

After law school at UCLA, Gillibrand won a prestigious clerkship for Judge Roger Miner in Albany on the federal court of appeals—and lost her first name. "The judge would not call me Tina," she recalls with a laugh. "He'd always call me Kirsten ­because Kirsten is my real name." It stuck: Tina disappeared entirely; even her husband calls her Kirsten because that's how she introduced herself when they met.

All you need to understand the work­aholic life of an associate at a major law firm like Davis Polk is to hear Gillibrand's story of her first date with Jonathan (it was a blind setup), who was studying in New York at Columbia University's business school. "I stood him up," she says with a hint of rueful embarrassment. "It was a Saturday night, and I was supposed to go to a black-tie party with him; it was a group date. But I had this presentation Monday morning to hundreds of lawyers; it was really a big presentation for me. I was really working very hard on getting my slides ready. And they weren't ready." So for want of a PowerPoint (she worked until three in the morning), the "Hi, I'm Kirsten" moment was delayed for three weeks. "He was supposed to stay [in America] for just one year until his program was over," she says. "And then he met me, so he wound up staying."

The wedding was held in a Catholic church on Park Avenue on Manhattan's Upper East Side. One emblematic detail: The bride had 14 attendants (no typo), although they were not all required to wear the same dress. "There were girls from her childhood, girls from Dartmouth, girls from law school," Whalen says. "Tina couldn't leave anyone out." It was not that Gillibrand fancied herself the second coming of Marie Antoinette, it was that she had a knack for collecting friends—which would prove one of the most useful traits in political fundraising. "Her whole life, she has had an enormous number of people around her who like to be around her," Bartley says. "And she capitalized on that."

After Gillibrand was appointed to Hillary Clinton's seat, The New York Times, in a front-page feature, revealed the kind of legal work that she was doing as a hard-driving associate at Davis Polk: advising Philip Morris in its battles with the federal government over cigarette smoking. Nothing in the Times article suggested any violation of legal ethics by Gillibrand, but working for tobacco companies is not generally considered a shrewd way for liberal Democratic politicians to burnish their image.

When confronted with a tough question—even one that she is expecting—Gillibrand's style is to angrily stare at her inquisitor and repeat talking points in the hopes that the messy business will simply vanish. When I ask whether she has any regrets over her work for a cigarette company (she continued to work for Philip Morris' parent company, Altria, when she moved to the prestigious law firm of Boies, Schiller as a partner in 2001), Gillibrand replies with a chill in her voice: "It's not how I see it. The way I see it is that I worked very hard at Davis Polk. I worked on all the cases assigned me; I didn't pick and choose. I got the best legal training in the world. And what I want to do now is to use all the advocacy skills to make a difference."

Maybe it was coincidental, but as tobacco ­became a pariah industry, Gillibrand began to display restlessness and doubts about her legal career in private practice. "I'm a problem-­solver," she says. "And when I was in a law firm, I felt like those talents were going to waste." While at Davis Polk, she became active in political fund-raising in New York through the Women's Leadership Forum of the Democratic National Committee. Former Hillary Clinton aide Karen Finney, now a Gillibrand consultant, says, "She absolutely was an excellent fundraiser even before she was in Congress."

In the waning days of the Clinton administration, Gillibrand left New York for a stint as special counsel to Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Andrew Cuomo, who may challenge Paterson for governor in the 2010 Democratic primary. "She was intense and a climber," recalls a Clinton administration official who worked with Gillibrand during this period. And as Gillibrand's mother puts it, "I think when she got to Washington with Andrew, she solidified her desire to go into politics. At that point, she was just looking to see where she could find an opening."

Doug Rutnik's mantra, which he passed on to his daughter before her initial 2006 House campaign, is: "If your skin isn't thick, don't get into politics." In the first weeks after her Senate appointment, Gillibrand demonstrated that she possesses the epidermis of a crocodile, appearing unflappable in public as both her political rivals and the press awarded her a Bronx cheer. An early February Times story on the new senator's wobbly start in statewide politics began with the lede: "That smile never disappears."

Whether it was visiting a Brooklyn high school where a student had been killed by gunfire or meeting with Hispanic groups to display a newfound sensitivity on immigration issues, Gillibrand seemed to critics like a politician undergoing a full makeover. "This was so transparent, so abrupt," says Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University. "It surprised people with its speed. There was nothing thoughtful about it. It is hard to look at her conversion and think that it was motivated by anything other than political expediency."

Asked to respond to this comment, Gillibrand argues, "Most people who enter the Senate have the benefit of a year-and-a-half

campaign to travel the state and to create a legislative agenda.... If you want to be judgmental, that's fine, but I have to be an effective senator and represent the needs of all constituents when I have a responsibility to do so. And so when I met with immigrant groups and I met with New Yorkers against gun violence, I was briefed by the very urgent needs in our state."

But even at her lowest political ebb, Gillibrand was blessed with powerful allies. Bill Clinton appeared at a fundraiser for his wife's successor. Schumer took his nonthreatening ­junior colleague under his wing, or, as Gillibrand puts it, "He always looks after me." And, most important, the White House ­decreed in mid-May that it did not want a bruising 2010 primary fight and to underscore that the fix was in, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee issued a press release hailing Long Island Congressman Israel's orchestrated decision to mute his ambitions and stay in the House.

Some of Senator Gillibrand's earliest adversaries have either been impressed by her reinvention or are realistic enough to bow to the inevitable. Veteran Brooklyn Congressman Edolphus Towns, who escorted Gillibrand through the grittier sections of his mostly African-American district, says, "I happen to like her. She's a hard worker, and the key thing for me is that she's somebody I can work with." Peter Rivera—the Hispanic state legislator who not long ago decried Gillibrand's xenophobia—now is a supporter. "Some of my colleagues are not impressed with her," Rivera concedes. "They think she's an opportunist. I think she's a strong advocate for immigrant issues. Some people consider that a flip-flop. I consider it an act of courage for her to moderate her views."

Gillibrand may still face a September 2010 challenge from Manhattan Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, who is signaling that she's poised to run but faces the daunting challenge of raising the more than $8 million needed to have a chance in a statewide Democratic primary. With President Obama and the Clintons on her side, it's difficult to think of another woman in national politics who has been granted the opportunities of a Kirsten Gillibrand. For the heiress to the seat once held by the lionized Bobby Kennedy, by scholar-­statesman Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and by the path-breaking Hillary Clinton—legends all—this is the moment to make a difference in ways that transcend mere fundraising prowess and political survival.

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