Off the Sidelines by Kirsten Gillibrand

Author:Kirsten Gillibrand [Gillibrand, Kirsten]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-7908-9
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2014-09-08T16:00:00+00:00

The whole first six months on the job were like drinking from a fire hose. Outside my home district, few of my nearly twenty million new constituents knew me or liked me, and my job was to win their trust. I needed to keep my head down, my spirits up, and work hard, reaching out to people and listening to their concerns so I could understand them and work on their behalf.

Given that I’d been appointed and not elected, I hadn’t had the chance to define myself, which my opponents and detractors started doing for me, often in harshly negative ways. I got called a parakeet with no original thoughts, a cipher, and Chuck Schumer’s puppet. The New York Observer published a cartoon depicting me as gun-loving Annie Oakley. (My rural congressional district included a lot of hunters, and I support their rights.) El Diario, an influential New York City Hispanic newspaper, ran an unflattering picture of me, along with the headline ANTI-INMIGRANTE. I was nicknamed Tracy Flick, the aggressive, comical, and somewhat unhinged blond high school student played by Reese Witherspoon in the movie Election. I’d liked the film well enough, but this was not a compliment. It was a put-down to me and other ambitious women, meant to keep us in our place. Yes, I’m competitive. I fight for what I believe in, and I drive hard toward my goals. Does that make me ruthless or crazed? No.

Jonathan was my hero, always trying to bolster my spirits. “Ignore them. They don’t know you,” he’d tell me. But he hated it. As he had during my first campaign, he asked to stop receiving our daily email of press mentions. He couldn’t handle it.

I tried to accept where we were and work to turn the situation around. I was new at my job, and I needed to address my inexperience and weaknesses head-on. My two most glaring issues were my House records on gun violence and immigration. Previously, I had only looked at these issues through the lens of my small, rural upstate district, which didn’t suffer greatly from gun violence or families battling a broken immigration system to stay together. But these issues mattered intensely to parts of New York State.

Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez, an outstanding leader in the Hispanic community, was skeptical of me and openly shared her opinion that I was a poor choice to fill Hillary’s Senate seat, because of my limited knowledge of immigration issues. So the day after I was appointed, I visited Nydia at her home in Brooklyn. I made it clear that I wanted her guidance in understanding what immigrant communities were going through, and over time and many frank conversations, we built a trust and rapport. By six months into my term we’d found solid footing. This meant a tremendous amount to me, and the photo from her endorsement of my 2010 Senate campaign still hangs in my office. Nydia also encouraged me to meet Sonia Sotomayor, and that resulted in Senator Schumer and me recommending her to President Obama to sit on the Supreme Court.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.