Paterson Announces Choice of Gillibrand for Senate Seat
ALBANY — Bringing to an end a weeks-long drama about who would replace Hillary Rodham Clinton as United States senator from New York, Gov. David A. Paterson announced that his choice was Representative Kirsten Gillibrand, a 42-year-old congresswoman from upstate who is known for bold political moves and centrist policy positions.
I appoint the senator from this moment on until a special election,” said Mr. Paterson, who made the announcement in a news conference here. “There is a special election. It will be held November 2010.”
Speaking from a platform crowded with New York political figures, Mr. Paterson said, “I believe that I have found the best candidate to become United States senator from New York.”
He added that “this senator has great shoes to fill” and that Mrs. Clinton had offered her support to Ms. Gillibrand.
“I realize that for many New Yorkers this is the first time you’ve heard my name and you don’t know much about me,” Ms. Gillibrand said, adding that she would work hard for all people in the state and listen to all her constituents.
She said that she aspired to follow in the footsteps of Ms. Clinton and that she looked forward to working with the senior senator from New York, Charles E. Schumer.
Mr. Schumer said it was important to have a senator from upstate New York and that he commended the governor for making the choice.
Ms. Gillibrand [pronounced JILL-uh-brand] is largely unknown to New Yorkers statewide, but is considered an up-and-coming and forceful lawmaker in her district and has gained considerable attention from Democratic leaders in Washington.
Mr. Paterson made his final decision shortly before 2 a.m. Friday after a marathon series of phone calls and deliberations with his top aides, according to the person who spoke to him. He began making phone calls to other contenders about 9 p.m., and had notified most of the other contenders by midnight. By then, the only two candidates who had not heard from Mr. Paterson were Ms. Gillibrand and Randi Weingarten, the president of the United Federation of Teachers.
One of Mr. Paterson’s preferences had been to select a woman to replace Mrs. Clinton.
The governor continued to deliberate and discuss the matter with his advisers — despite earlier reports that he had settled on Ms. Gillibrand — until he made his decision, according to the person who talked to him. He then called Ms. Gillibrand, who had earlier in the evening been told to come to Albany to await an announcement, to let her know she was his pick.
If Mr. Paterson was hoping to quiet the tumult over the selection process by picking Ms. Gillibrand, there were indications that he may not get his wish. Ms. Gillibrand, who has been endorsed by the National Rifle Association, is controversial among some of the party’s more liberal leaders downstate.
Representative Carolyn McCarthy, a Long Island Democrat and ardent gun control activist, said Thursday that if Ms. Gillibrand got the job, she was prepared to run against her in a primary in 2010. Ms. McCarthy was elected to Congress after her husband was killed in a gunman’s rampage on the Long Island Rail Road in 1993.
Ms. Gillibrand’s selection was a careful political calculation by the governor, who will run for his second term as governor in 2010, when Ms. Gillibrand will also be on the ballot. The choice reflects Mr. Paterson’s thinking that his selection should be someone who can help him attract key demographics — in Ms. Gillibrand’s case upstate New Yorkers and women.
Ms. Gillibrand, who lives near Hudson, N.Y., 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. (Ms. Gillibrand 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.)
Ms. Gillibrand, who had never held public office, won her seat in 2006 against great odds, defeating a four-term Republican incumbent in a race that turned intense and nasty in its final days.
She proved to be a formidable candidate, raising millions of dollars and assembling a campaign organization that aggressively exploited the personal and political baggage of her opponent, Representative John E. Sweeney, who frequently found himself on the defensive.
Just before the election, for example, the Sweeney camp accused Ms. Gillibrand of being behind a published report that the police had been called to the congressman’s home during a domestic disturbance. Mr. Sweeney even ran a television spot in which his wife, Gayle Sweeney, spoke of how his rival was attempting to “slander my marriage, husband and family.”
Mr. Sweeney eventually admitted that the police had been called to his home. In the end, Ms. Gillibrand won with 53 percent of the vote.
The news of Ms. Gillibrand’s appointment followed a day of anonymous and often bitter sniping over Caroline Kennedy’s mystifying departure from the Senate field.
Because the governor has often contradicted his own comments about the Senate pick in the course of a single day, no one in the capital appeared ready to say for certain who the new senator would be. Ms. Gillibrand’s was the name most frequently mentioned, though other candidates, including Ms. Weingarten and Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo, were not ruled out.
The governor’s announcement on Friday is unlikely to immediately undo the public relations damage over the collapse of Ms. Kennedy’s candidacy or put to rest criticism that the governor had lost control of the selection process.
There was incredulity in Democratic circles on Thursday afternoon after the governor’s camp engaged in a ferocious public back-and-forth with Ms. Kennedy’s side, reaching out to numerous news organizations to disparage her qualifications; one person close to the governor said that her candidacy had been derailed by problems involving taxes and a household employee, but declined to provide details.
That account was at odds with Ms. Kennedy’s own description of her reasons for withdrawing. While not denying that issues had arisen, aides to Ms. Kennedy played down their significance, saying they had been aired out in discussions between the Paterson and Kennedy camps over the last two weeks and were not considered by either side to be disqualifying.
Ms. Kennedy’s only tax issue on the public record appeared to be a $615 city tax lien that she settled in 1994, a minuscule amount for a multimillionaire.
The person close to the governor also said emphatically that Mr. Paterson “never had any intention of picking Kennedy” because he had come to consider her unready for the job.
But several people who had spoken to the governor said he had decided on Ms. Kennedy weeks ago. A Democratic operative with ties to Mr. Paterson said the governor told Ms. Kennedy last week that she was the choice but that he would use the next few days to do “a little misdirection to keep the suspense up.”
Later Thursday, the two sides appeared to agree to a cease-fire.
At 5 p.m., Mr. Paterson’s office said “the governor considers Caroline a friend and knows she will continue to serve New York well inside or outside of government.”
No “information gathered during this selection process created a necessity for any candidate to withdraw,” the statement said, adding that “speculation to the contrary is both inaccurate and inappropriate.”
Shortly thereafter, a spokesman for Ms. Kennedy issued a statement saying: “Caroline Kennedy withdrew her name for consideration from the United States Senate for personal reasons. Any statements to the contrary are false.”
Certainly, the bid for the Senate seat was a bracing process for Ms. Kennedy. Before she began her candidacy last month, she was a quiet celebrity daughter of a storied and tragic family, fondly remembered by many Americans as a young girl in the White House who liked to ride horses.
On Thursday, an aide to Ms. Kennedy, offering the fullest explanation so far of her exit, said a personal problem had emerged on Wednesday. She called the governor around 3 or 4 p.m., the aide said, to tell him that she would be withdrawing from consideration for the appointment. According to the aide, Mr. Paterson told Ms. Kennedy to take a day to think about it.
At no point, the aide said, did the governor tell Ms. Kennedy she was out of the running. “He was saying she was a contender, she was involved, and things were going the way they were going,” the aide said. “He did not tell her either way that it was yes or no, but that she was still being considered.”
At that point, the aide said, Ms. Kennedy began consulting with friends and family. Around the same time, news outlets, including The New York Post and The New York Times, began reporting that she had withdrawn.
The Paterson administration initially refused to respond to the reports. Then, about 7 p.m. Wednesday, a spokesman for Mr. Paterson said in a brief interview that the governor had dismissed the idea that Ms. Kennedy was withdrawing as “just the rumor of the day.”
But at the time, according to Ms. Kennedy’s aide, the governor and Ms. Kennedy had already spoken about the possibility of her withdrawing.
Ms. Kennedy’s own political advisers appeared at times to be unable to reach her on Wednesday night. At one point late in the evening, Ms. Kennedy was drafting a statement reaffirming her interest in the seat. But she ultimately concluded that she would go ahead with her plan to withdraw, and released a statement by e-mail at 12:03 a.m. Thursday, saying, “I informed Governor Paterson today that for personal reasons I am withdrawing my name from consideration for the United States Senate.”
Rumors about who will get the Senate appointment spread through the capital Thursday, and several people who are longtime allies of the governor warned that he was unpredictable.
While some Democratic lawmakers and officials said during the day that they believed Ms. Gillibrand was the front-runner, others pondered whether the attention on her was being fanned by Mr. Paterson’s own advisers to distract the press as he laid the groundwork to pick someone else.
Ms. Gillibrand did her best to stay out of the line of fire, skipping a meeting of the House Armed Services Committee and declining, through a spokeswoman, to issue any statements throughout the day.
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