WELL, it finally looks as though Hillary Clinton has broken the 43 percent barrier.
The Quinnipiac poll ranking her against Rep. Rick Lazio, the Republican expected to succeed Rudy Giuliani in the Senate race, shows her winning 50 percent of the vote to Lazio’s 31 percent.
That result indicates the extent of the difficulty now facing Lazio and the Republicans. Conventional wisdom in political circles for more than a year has been sympathetic to the idea that Lazio is a candidate of equal or even superior value to Rudy Giuliani – except when it came to fundraising, where Rudy’s national profile made raising $22 million relatively easy.
But after months and millions of dollars in free publicity as the man-in-waiting, Lazio begins his race 19 points down – as opposed to Giuliani, who has consistently either run somewhat ahead of the first lady or been locked in a statistical dead heat.
The contrast between the Hillary-Rudy polls and the Hillary-Lazio poll demonstrates that Giuliani wasn’t merely strong in contrast to her. He was strong in his own right.
Lazio (or anyone else who gets the GOP nomination) has to turn those numbers around. The only way to do that is to make Hillary more unpopular. Lazio has to “go negative,” in the parlance of the campaign strategist.
And going negative on Hillary means talking about her failed health-care plan. It means bringing up the White House sleaze that has surrounded her for seven years. It means asking voters whether the fact that a woman is married to a president who cheated on her and humiliated her makes her therefore somehow due a Senate seat as consolation.
So this is a moment of dread and hope.
The dread is that, in this relatively liberal state, it will be nearly impossible to go negative on Hillary without it backfiring.
* Whitewater helped end Alfonse D’Amato’s Senate career because he had served as the chief Senate inquisitor. As a D’Amato protégé, Lazio knows how radioactive the Clinton scandals can be.
* And the Hillary campaign is convinced that attacks on Hillary’s role in the health-care fiasco of 1994 might actually boomerang – because if Republicans talk a lot about how she tried to change health care for the worse, New York voters might still hear only that at least she tried to change health care.
Going negative is a path with all sorts of land mines hidden along the way. And Lazio will be tempted to run a positive campaign. His brilliant strategist, Mike Murphy, followed just that course with the McCain campaign, and it worked like a charm – until McCain lost it in South Carolina and began whining about the negativity of his opponent, and then went negative himself after promising he would not do so.
McCain is a national hero; Lazio is a well-known unknown. Yes, Lazio could spend tens of millions of dollars on positive advertising that makes it clear what a nice and attractive and well-spoken and not-scary Republican he is – and when the dust cleared he would end up with 45 percent of the vote.
So Lazio has no choice but to go on the attack. And that’s where the hope comes in. If Lazio and Murphy can figure out an effective way to discuss Hillary’s checkered White House career and her central involvement in Clinton sleaze, they will succeed where conservative editorialists and columnists (like me) and the impeachers so sadly failed.
That will force New Yorkers to open their eyes to things they have refused to see for so long – thus making it explicit that New York’s signal contribution to this election season would be to defeat Hillary and thereby retire the Clintons from public life.
It’s surely not the race Lazio wants to run. But as John Dryden said, “None but the brave deserves the fair.” It takes guts to win a Senate race in New York – the guts to face down the Clinton machine and speak the truth.
True, nobody has prospered taking on the Clinton machine directly. But these are desperate times, and desperate measures must be taken.
E-mail: podhoretz@nypost.com