On a gorgeous day in early July, Rep. Susan Molinari was seen jogging at the high school track near her home, a modest bungalow located in a quiet, tree-lined neighborhood. Wearing a baggy T-shirt and shorts, the pretty, petite blond smiled radiantly at fellow joggers, pausing to wave merrily at a suspicious toddler left to play in a sand pile while his parents jogged around him.
Later, Molinari paused on her way home to exchange a few words with Frank LaNotti, 70, who offered her tomatoes and flowers from his magnificent garden across the street from the high school.
“She always says hello,” LaNotti said. “Sometimes when she’s walking her dog, she says, `Now Frank, now you come walk around with me and talk to me for a while,’ and I have to go around the track with her and George (Molinari’s dog).”
To her supporters, Molinari, 38, is a “sweetheart,” a savvy, immensely charming politician with the common touch, whose meteoric rise to a position of power in the Republican Party has been fueled by her personal warmth and a rare ability to cross party and ideological lines to represent her generation of moderate, pro-abortion, Republican women.
And as Molinari prepares to deliver the keynote address to the Republican National Convention, these supporters hope that she will be able to use this personal warmth and charm to help heal the deep divisions within the Republican Party and reach out to voters, particularly women, who have been turned off by the party’s image as a bastion of white male privilege.
“So often competency and arrogance are two things that go hand in hand,” Molinari’s press secretary James Mazzarella said during an interview with Molinari in her Washington office. “Susan is very competent, but every elevator operator in this building loves Ms. Molinari, every cop, everybody loves her.”
“Staff suck-up!” Molinari interjected with a burst of laughter, her brown eyes dancing.
It is spontaneous, unpretentious remarks like this that make Molinari so likable. That, and her non-militant but tenancious pro-abortion stance and even her recent admission that she smoked marijuana in college reinforce the impression that she is real person, a typical woman of her generation who is also very, very nice.
Since her first political campaign, a successful run for the New York City Council in 1985, Molinari has shown an ability to blend with her constituency, to look and sound like “one of us.”
A then newly arrived Staten Island housewife who asked that her name not be used remembers seeing Susan campaign. “The doorbell rang, and here was this girl with a big blond bouffant, a red ruffled blouse, black stretch pants and high heels. I thought it was the Tupperware lady, but she said she was Susan Molinari and she was running for City Council.”
Despite her emergence as one of the leaders of the Republican Party, Molinari still exudes a down-home touch. While she adopts standard business clothing in Washington, back home she can still be seen schlepping around the stores in shorts and T-shirts or an old track suit, leading Staten Islanders to boast, with gleeful affection, that “I saw Sue Molinari at Kmart today, and she looked like hell!”
Since her 1994 marriage to U.S. Rep. Bill Paxon, a Republican from Buffalo, and the birth of their daughter, Susan Ruby, on May 10 of this year, the anecdotes have expanded to include tales of seeing the newlyweds walking hand in hand (along with George) and of Molinari proudly toting Susan Ruby around, accepting advice and compliments from cooing grandmothers.
Her Staten Island neighbors insist that Molinari’s apparent warmth and concern for others are genuine.
“If you have a problem, she’s not the type to say, See my aides. She says, Come down to the office, and we’ll see what we can do,” said Marion Sweeney, as she worked in her yard a few blocks from Molinari’s home.
Clearly Molinari, like her father, Staten Island Borough President Guy Molinari, a veteren politician of 22 years, who formerly held the congressional seat his daughter holds now, is wildly popular in her home borough. Molinari won her last election with more than 70 percent of the votes, and both daughter and father consistently score in the 70-80 percent range in public approval and name recognition polls.
“The Molinaris are the closest thing to a political cult in New York,” remarked New York City Councilman Sal Albanese, who ran against Susan Molinari for U.S. Congress in 1992 and lost. Although Albanese garnered 40 percent of the vote and won in the part of Molinari’s 13th Congressional District that laps into southern Brooklyn, “we were never able to penetrate Staten Island. The Molinari machine was too entrenched.”
Molinari’s persistent popularity and reputation as a moderate bewilders and frustrates liberals like Albanese, who is running for mayor of New York on the Democratic ticket.
“She is really not a moderate. She comes from a middle- and working-class district but she votes as if she represents a community in which the average income is $190,000. In a district that’s one of the most polluted in the state, she carries the ball for major corporations that include some of the biggest polluters. I think if her constituents were really aware of her record, they would not be happy campers.”
Political opponents point to her voting record as proof that Molinari is a right-wing extremist, anti- environment, anti-poor and anti-labor. For her 1995 votes, she received ratings of 8 percent from the League of Conservation Voters, 9 percent from the Children’s Defense Fund and, coming from an island with over 60,000 union members out of a total population of about 380,000, 0 percent from the AFL-CIO. “A fat 0.0 percent!” sputtered Staten Island labor leader Larry Hanley, president of the Amalgamated Transit Workers Union, Local 726. “She should be the congresswoman from Selma, Alabama!”
Molinari shrugs off these ratings.
“You can take votes on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste disposal bill and rate them three times and come up with a negative environment rating. But it would be fairly meaningless to the people I represent.”
Similarly, she dismisses the contention that she has made a sharp veer to the right since her marriage to conservative Paxon, who is chairman of the Republican National Congressional Committee, and her well-publicized political alliance with House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
“Some people may have misinterpreted where she’s actually stood on the issues,” Mazzarella said. “She’s always been very conservative in fiscal matters. And largely in the last year we’ve been discussing fiscal issues so it seems that she’s much more conservative.”
“My positions on the issues have never changed,” Molinari asserted.
But one accusation clearly galls Molinari. It’s the accusation that despite her considerable political talents she is a lightweight, lacking “substance.”
“I think in this society there’s a tendency that if you do try to be nice, if you do not try to take yourself too seriously, people who want to vilify will say that you’re not of substance,” she said tartly. “I’m perfectly comfortable based on the legislation I sponsored and the things that I’ve done to knock that accusation right out of the box.
“I think there’s not a woman in the workforce or in the home that hasn’t heard constant talk about how serious she is,” she added. “I think that’s true of any woman in corporate America, any woman in medicine, and any woman in journalism.
“Here’s an example. Everyone gives Katie Couric credit for being a tough negotiator, but when she and Bob Dole had their thing, it was, well, he chose to fight with `America’s Sweetheart.’ I mean, come on. Ms. Couric has been reporting longer and has been more aggressive than three-quarters of her male counterparts, and yet it’s Bob Dole picking on `America’s Sweetheart’!”
But opponents insist that “substance,” including a deeper understanding of the issues, is exactly what Molinari is missing.
“Let me tell you a story about Susan,” recounted Hanley. “I had a union member who was having trouble with his medical insurance, and we sent him to Susan. She was very nice to him and later wrote me a very indignant letter about how inadequate his medical coverage was. I wrote back and said, Susan, you just voted to keep us from striking. How can we negotiate for better medical coverage if we can’t strike?
“I think if the people really understood what she’s about, she’d get about 5 votes,” Hanley concluded bitterly. “But they go on voting for her because she’s perky, she’s their little Susie.”
“I know if I came to her with a terrible case involving an individual, she would help,” said a Staten Island black community activist who nervously declined to be identified. “But whether she understands the larger global issues involved in unemployment and poverty is another matter.”
Molinari’s pro-abortion stance, strong record on domestic violence and obvious personal ability and charm, combined with her right-wing voting record and association with Gingrich, have left prominent feminists in a quandary.
Patricia Ireland, president of the National Organization for Women, decribes herself as “ambivalent” about Molinari. “On the one hand, I think she has strengths, and of course we like to see women in positions of power. On the other hand, I have to remember that she’s campaigning for some people who have taken some very right-wing positions. I thinks she’s being brought in to put a kinder, gentler face on a party that’s adopted a very right-wing extremist platform.”
