Kirsten Gillibrand is it. The new U.S. Senator from New York.
New York Gov. David Paterson has selected the 42-year-old congresswoman to fill Hillary Rodham Clinton’s seat, according to the New York Times. Gillibrand is widely viewed as smart, tough and an up-and-comer. But she is also anti-gun control and supports extending the Bush tax-cuts - positions that may open her to primary challenges next year from more liberal Democrats.
For Paterson, who will run for his first full term in 2010 and is particularly weak in the more conservative areas of upstate New York, the Albany-born Gillibrand is a perfect wing woman. She’s a member of the Blue Dog Coalition, a group of fiscally conservative Congressional Democrats.
Her upstate district, which voted twice for George W. Bush, starts at the northern fringe of New York City’s suburbs, and extends up the eastern and western sides of the Hudson River. Not surprisingly in a part of the state where deer outnumber people, she is an avid supporter of gun rights - one of the few Democrats to get a perfect rating from the National Rifle Association.
But that position has also earned her enmity among some members of the NY delegation. Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, a Long Island Democrat, said yesterday that if Gillibrand got the job, she was prepared to challenge her in 2010. McCarthy was elected to Congress after her husband was killed and her son paralyzed in a gunman’s rampage on the Long Island Rail Road in 1993.
Despite her brief career in Congress, Gillibrand is no political neophyte. She “comes from a politically sophisticated family,” writes the Almanac of American Politics. “[H]er father was an attorney and lobbyist with ties to George Pataki; her grandmother was a prominent Democratic activist in Albany who brought Gillibrand along with her on the campaign trail.”
In college, she interned for Alfonse D’Amato, the former GOP senator from New York who appeared by her side at today’s announcement. Her father, Douglas Rutnik, is a lawyer and lobbyist in Albany with close ties to former Gov. George Pataki, as well as to D’Amato. Indeed, for several years, Rutnik dated Zenia Mucha, a top aide to both Republicans.
Gillibrand graduated from Dartmouth College magna cum laude with a major in Asian studies, and received her law degree from the UCLA School of Law in 1991. During the Clinton administration, she was special counsel to Andrew Cuomo when he was secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Gillibrand surprised the political establishment when she defeated a four-term Republican incumbent, John E. Sweeney, against considerable odds. It was a tough - and nasty - campaign. Just before the election, the Sweeney camp accused her of orchestrating a published report that police had been called to the congressman’s home during a domestic disturbance. But Gillibrand won with 53 percent of the vote.
She has not been shy about embracing a maverick role in Congress either - she was one of 99 House Democrats to vote against the $700 billion bailout of the banks, helping to hand defeat to Nancy Pelosi on the issue. She maintained her no vote on the second bailout bill that ultimately passed, calling it “fundamentally flawed.”
But Gillibrand also got 100% ratings from both the American Civil Rights Union and NARAL Pro-Choice New York, according to Project Vote Smart.
Gillibrand lives just outside of Albany with her husband, Jonathan Gillibrand, a financial consultant, and their sons, Theodore, who is 5, and Henry, who is 6 months old. She received a standing ovation on the floor of the House from her colleagues for working right up to the day she gave birth to Henry.
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