‘Going to run’ for Prez
Gilli joins crowd of Dems seeking nom
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.
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 progun 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. David Paterson to replace Hillary Clinton, however, 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.