Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand announces White House run on 'Late Show with Stephen Colbert'

By MICHAEL MCAULIFF and BRIAN NIEMIETZ
| NEW YORK DAILY NEWS |
JAN 15, 2019 | 6:30 PM



Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) attends a post-midterm election meeting of Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network in the Kennedy Caucus Room at the Russell Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill November 14, 2018 in Washington, DC. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)



It’s no joke.


Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand used a Tuesday appearance on the “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” to announce that she is launching an exploratory committee for a White House run.


“It’s an important first step and it's one I am taking because I am going to run,” the 52-year-old New York Democrat told Colbert.


Gillibrand joins what is expected to be a crowded primary field for the Democratic nomination that could include more than a dozen candidates. Already, Gillibrand has plans to travel to the leadoff caucus state of Iowa later this week.


She also has more than $10.5 million left over from her 2018 re-election campaign that she can use toward a presidential run.


Gillibrand said she wants to provide health care and education for all and to fight “institutional racism” from the White House.


“I know I have the passion, the courage and fearless determination to get that done,” she said.


Colbert gave the candidate a gift basket with a baby doll to kiss and a plane ticket to Michigan.





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Gillibrand’s announcement comes less than three months after she promised to serve her full term in the Senate.


She first publicly confirmed she was considering a 2020 bid just two days after winning reelection to her senate seat.


“I believe right now that every one of us should figure out how we can do whatever we can with our time, with our talents to restore that moral decency, that moral compass and that truth of who we are as Americans, so I will promise you I will give it a long, hard thought of consideration,” she told Colbert at the time.


At a debate a month earlier, Gillibrand pledged to keep working on Capitol Hill.


“I will serve my six-year term," she said.


The junior senator from upstate is not as well-known nationally as some of her likely rivals, and early polling numbers that largely depend on name recognition put her in the low single digits.


But with a prodigious fund-raising operation -- she garnered more than $27 million for her own re-election and more than $8 million for other candidates in 2018 -- she can start to turn that around.


More problematically for her in a campaign field that's likely to lean left, she faces a certain amount of distrust from the liberal wing of her party.


Some of it is because when she first won office in upstate New York in 2006, she operated like a moderate to conservative Democrat, taking anti-immigration and pro-gun stances. She had an A rating from the NRA at one point. She also represented numerous corporate clients, including Phillip Morris, when she was a Manhattan lawyer.


Since being chosen by then-Gov. Patterson to replace Hillary Clinton, however, the 52-year-old Gillibrand has dramatically shifted such positions, which she says stemmed from the conversations she had with the people who would be her new constituents.


In the Senate, she kept moving left, to the point where she was sometimes at odds with her own party, particularly on women's issues. Then-Senate Armed Services Chairman Karl Levin (D-Mich.) and moderate Democrat Sen. Claire McCaskill (Mo.) bitterly fought Gillibrand over her push to take sexual assault prosecutions in the military out of the chain of command. Gillibrand was among the first to call for then-Gov. Eliot Spitzer to quit amid his prostitution scandal. Spitzer later called Gillibrand "wrong" and "malleable" when she got the Senate job.


Her most recent problem with the left, though, is that she was the first Democrat in the Senate to come out and demand the resignation of liberal icon, Minnesota Sen. Al Franken.


Franken became a hero to the left and was the subject of his own presidential buzz before an image came out of him cupping his hands in front to the breasts of woman on a tour with him.


When allegations against Franken rose to eight, Gillibrand said he had to go, sparking a pile-on that saw Franken soon give in. Yet, many of his adherents still hold it against her. Major donors and Democratic Party insiders recently told Politico that they would never give money to or work for Gillibrand in 2020.


They -- and many Franken supporters on the left -- thought she threw one of the party's most effective senators under the bus before the charges could be properly investigated. They called her "opportunistic," though Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was believed at the time to be poised to make the same call.


Gillibrand sources, however, point to her consistent track record on women's issues, and say if her opponents want make an issue out of Franken, they don't mind it at all.


"If people want to remind America of the misogyny that continues to exist at the highest levels, and Kirsten's willingness to stand on principle against it, regardless of the cost, we welcome that," one said.


There are things Gillibrand has working in her favor. Her record in the Senate is in line with Democratic voters, and in several ways was ahead of the curve in her party, beyond the push against sexual harassment. She wrote the first versions of the anti-insider trading law that became the Stock Act, and that the party is trying to build on in their 2020 platform with a new bill dubbed the "For The People Act."


And despite hewing left, she has also been able to win over Republicans, notching victories in numerous upstate Trump-leaning counties in 2018, and winning with 72 percent in 2012 -- a year when Barack Obama reached just 63% in New York.


Gillibrand is also often underestimated. In 2010, when Republicans in the Senate voted to kill 9/11 legislation, she and Schumer convinced then-Majority Leader Harry Reid to let them have one more try. Sources told the News at the time that Gillibrand won over the top holdout, Sen. Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican nicknamed "Dr. No" for his opposition to any new spending programs.


But for Gillibrand, he said yes. The James Zadroga 9/11 Law is now permanent because of it.


John Feal, the lead 9/11 advocate in that struggle now and then, said no one should count out New York's junior senator.


"We met with Sen Coburn several times before she did. We couldn't get him to budge," Feal said. "When she took the initiative to sit with him, he changed his mind. I was shocked."


"She's got bigger Abe Lincolns than 99 percent of the men in the Senate and the House. And the White House," Feal said.

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