Word: lazio
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...perfect setting for a photo-op: a second-grade classroom in Rochester, N.Y., with back-to-school art on the walls, crisp uniforms on the children and a big grin on the puppy-dog face of Rick Lazio, the Republican Congressman who's running for the Senate against Hillary Rodham Clinton. But reality has a way of intruding, as Lazio discovered when a little girl looked up at him and said, "I watched you on NBC last night--why were you fighting with Mrs. Clinton...
...precocious seven-year-old noticed, the Clinton-Lazio debate in Buffalo last Wednesday was a nasty piece of business, with Clinton portraying Lazio as Newt Gingrich's house elf and Lazio assailing Hillary's character and trustworthiness at every turn. But Lazio just laughed off the child's question and said, "We were talking about our different ideas...
...teacher would give that answer an Incomplete. Most of the fighting in Buffalo was not about ideas; it was about tactics. Clinton bashed Lazio's voting record in an attempt to show he's a right-wing hack (in truth, he's more of a split-the-difference guy; his tax-cut plan, for instance, is smaller than George W. Bush's but bigger than Al Gore's). And since Hillary doesn't have a voting record, Lazio just bashed her. It was his chance to get back into a race that was in danger of slipping away from...
When he declared his candidacy in May, after New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani bowed out, the little-known Lazio was immediately tied with Clinton in the polls. But in September, as Al Gore's campaign took off, Clinton crept into the lead, and some reporters who follow Lazio took to calling him the Incredible Shrinking Candidate. He has a lot in common with Bush. Both men have been trying to shake the idea that they are too slight for the jobs they seek. Both hope that attacking their opponents' character will propel them to victory. And both have stumbled...
...Lazio changed the subject in Buffalo. Early on, after Clinton offered a lame defense of her disastrous 1994 health-care-reform plan, Lazio scored by saying that "a New Yorker would never have made that proposal," neatly tying her health-care problem to her carpetbagger problem. He had a nice line ready for her attempts to yoke him to Gingrich--"Mrs. Clinton, you of all people shouldn't try to make guilt by association"--but delivered it like a dinner-theater Hamlet, all portent and no grace. Then his aggressive stage direction got the best of him, and he went...