True, but it should be obvious that the counterpart to that is you don’t have to view it through a lens of naivety or foolishness either.
It’s not as if there are a shortage of articles going back 10 years discussing how she downplays her role in the Philip Morris defense to the level of dishonesty if all the third party evidence (both coworkers and documentary evidence) is to be believed. Nor are there a shortage of articles casting her as a political opportunist.
30 minutes reading up on her led to
A fierce opponent of immigration reform, she pushed for local law enforcement to carry out federal immigration policies. She wanted English to be the official language of the United States and cosponsored the SAVE Act, which aimed to “to crack down on illegal immigration with more border guards and surveillance technology, accelerated deportations and a mandatory program requiring employers to verify the immigration status of employees.” When Patterson appointed her as a senator in 2009 she was immediately criticized for her inexperience, her obvious ambition for higher office, and her flip-flopping on issues.
The flip-flopping was real: Shortly after her ascension to the Senate, she hired “a public-affairs consulting company with ties to the Hispanic community” and pledged her support for the DREAM Act, according to a 2013 Atlantic profile. All of a sudden she was pro-immigrant and pro–gun control, which she attributes to going on a “listening tour” through New York State, a move borrowed from Clinton.
In an interview with Politico’s Glenn Thrush last year, during the Democratic primaries, Gillibrand explained that she was deeply affected by meeting with families of gun violence victims. “It’s so crippling—I mean, I sat down with a mother last week in Brooklyn, and she lost her four-year-old baby… she took her kid to a park,” she told Thrush. “Every mom takes their kid to a park. And she took her kid to a park and the kid was killed, a baby, a four-year-old.”
It was all right out of the Hillary Clinton playbook; 16 months before her own election to the Senate, Clinton traveled the state on her own “listening tour.” Gillibrand says today that her evolution makes sense, as she now represents an entire state instead of just one congressional district. For that transformation to be credible, however, Gillibrand needed to undertake what Clinton had before: an observable period of “education,” even if it was one that was noticeably brief. (According to The New York Times, Schumer even had to tell her to “slow down” so that it didn’t look quite so blatantly political.)
While Congress was in the midst of an epic struggle to pass a bill on background checks, gun-reform advocates were doing whatever they could to pull vulnerable members off the fence. When Gillibrand brought up her bill on gun trafficking—a bill that would make it a federal crime for straw purchasers to legally buy weapons in states with loose gun laws and sell them to people in other states with stricter laws—some worried that the background-check bill, one of deep importance to Schumer, would suffer.
“The background-check bill was both the biggest policy fix and the most salable,” says one Washington gun-reform advocate who believed that Gillibrand was more interested in building her brand than ushering in successful legislation. “Neither of those facts was persuasive to Gillibrand, who was so eager to introduce the first bill with bipartisan support that she screwed Schumer by rushing out a trafficking bill. It was watered down, it was politically low-hanging fruit, and it gave members in both chambers an excuse to say they supported something. It let them off the hook way too easy.” The background-check bill has yet to make it to a vote.
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“She’s actually a problem,” says Bart Naylor of Public Citizen. “She’s not someone we go to when we want change on banking reform.”
Naylor points to a letter she wrote asking for the delay of the “Volcker Rule,” a proposal in the Dodd-Frank legislation that would reign in risky trading by the country’s largest banks. While Gillibrand likes to say she supports the rule, the language of the letter echoes arguments of those interests that have sought a more extensive delay.
The New York Times’ editorial board also raised concerns about Gillibrand in July of this year regarding yet another letter she signed, in which the senator urges delay of another portion of the Dodd-Frank law, this one involving derivatives. In doing so, The Times contended that Gillibrand was “going against the cause of reform, lobbying for delays that would derail the law.”
“It’s impossible to prove that the money influenced her, but all we can say is, Gillibrand gets money from Wall Street and does things as far as I can tell that Wall Street wants,” Naylor says.
Or the entirety of this:
Again, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with pragmatism, opportunism, or being willing to flow with your constituency/party. Quite the opposite, more people like her in the House/Senate would undoubtedly improve it.
But she’s running for President and nothing about her seems authentic beyond wanting to be President.