With Cox Out of the Race, Pirro Gathers GOP Support

WASHINGTON – The departure of Edward Cox from the field of Republican candidates seeking to unseat Senator Clinton in 2006 may open the spigots of national Republican support for Jeanine Pirro, the Westchester district attorney who has Governor Pataki’s backing in the Senate race.Mrs. Pirro has raised just more than $400,000 since declaring her candidacy in early August, while Mrs. Clinton raised almost $5.3 million in the last quarter, adding to an already substantial war chest. Mr. Cox dropped out of the race Friday, the same day Mr. Pataki threw his support behind Mrs. Pirro.A spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Brian Nick, said in response to Friday’s developments: “I think in terms of Pirro’s campaign, they’re putting a structure together, and I would expect them to raise a lot of money. That’s a very formidable challenge, and I think that’s going to be a competitive campaign.”The Republican National Committee pledged its support for “an agenda that’s going to create progress for voters of the Empire State, exclusively focused on their interests and needs, versus Senator Clinton, who appears to be using New York as a stepping-stone to further her own national aspirations,” a committee spokesman, Danny Diaz, said yesterday. The RNC, he added, would support the effort to unseat Mrs. Clinton “in any way possible.”Recently hired as Mrs. Pirro’s campaign manager was Brian Donahue, a former RNC get-out-the-vote expert and head of the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign in West Virginia, considered a “swing state” last year. Republican operatives here also pointed to the transfer of the NRSC’s finance director, Megan Foran, and a communications staffer for House Republicans, Andrea Tantaros, to the Pirro campaign as evidence of national Republicans’ support of Mrs. Pirro.According to one close observer of Mrs. Clinton’s political ambitions, Dick Morris, the characterizations of the Pirro campaign as moribund after Friday were “premature and inaccurate.” Mrs. Pirro’s fund-raising efforts, Mr. Morris and other analysts pointed out yesterday, have been based primarily on a national direct-mail campaign, the benefits of which, they said, will not be reaped until the next campaign-finance reporting deadline.Moreover, Mr. Morris added in an email to The New York Sun, “With Pataki’s endorsement now, and, one suspects, Rudy Giuliani’s to follow, Pirro is now in a position to get help from the national Republican Party.”The national GOP sees the Pirro campaign as something other than strictly an opportunity to pick up another Senate seat, observers said. Given New York’s heavily Democratic politics, they said, an outright Pirro triumph over Mrs. Clinton seemed unlikely. Victory, they said, would more likely be measured by the damage Mrs. Pirro is able to inflict on Mrs. Clinton in advance of her 2008 run for the White House.“Hillary Clinton is a national figure and this race will be a national race,” a Washington-based Republican pollster, David Winston, said yesterday. Mr. Winston compared the Pirro candidacy to Senator Thune’s unseating of Senator Daschle in South Dakota last year, a race in which Mr. Thune got a lot of help from the RNC.Now that Mrs. Pirro has been all but anointed Mrs. Clinton’s Republican challenger, Mr. Winston said, the national GOP would likely start helping with get-out-the-vote efforts, advertising, campaign infrastructure, and direct-mail fundraising.Mr. Winston and other analysts downplayed suggestions that Mrs. Pirro’s inability to fund-raise extensively signified the death of the nationwide “anti-Hillary” movement, saying that until this weekend, Mrs. Pirro had been running against Mr. Cox, not Mrs. Clinton, and thus had not benefited from that natural, national fund-raising base.A veteran pollster based in upstate New York, John Zogby, however, dismissed the idea that national Republicans would jump on the Pirro bandwagon after Friday’s developments.Mrs. Pirro, Mr. Zogby said, would have to prove to the national Republican Party that her candidacy was a viable one before receiving significant support. Reporting only $400,000 in early fund raising, he said, was not the way to do it.“The RNC is not going to be foolish,” Mr. Zogby said yesterday, explaining that it was much more important to Republicans that they retain their majorities in the House and Senate than to inflict minimal damage on Mrs. Clinton. “They’re going to spend their money on races they can win and pick up.” Mrs. Pirro’s, the pollster added, was not likely to be one of them.

With Cox Out of the Race, Pirro Gathers GOP Support

With Cox Out of the Race, Pirro Gathers GOP Support

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