NYM: How do you respond to the mayor's charge that you politicized this?

HRC: You know, when the incident occurred, the mayor and I both said New Yorkers should wait and reserve judgment until all the facts come out. I am still waiting. It was the mayor who politicized this and led the rush to judgment here.

NYM: Some people have observed that, while they may agree with you on the mayor's role, it sounds like you're getting into an argument about his mayoralty, and since you haven't lived here, that's an argument you can't ultimately win.

HRC: I'm talking about leadership here. I mean, if Rudy Giuliani won't represent all New Yorkers as mayor, then how is he going to represent the whole state in the Senate?

NYM: You describe yourself as a New Democrat. Many liberals spent eight years thinking and hoping you were sort of the liberal secret weapon in the White House. And then there's this other set of people who believe you have this secret radical agenda. How have your views changed since you were young?

HRC: Well, my gosh, I've gone from a Barry Goldwater Republican to a New Democrat, but I think my underlying values have remained pretty constant. Individual responsibility and community -- I don't see those as mutually inconsistent. I think our politics of the last 30 years has been fraught with false choices that I don't think reflect the common-sense, pragmatic progressive strain of American politics that I've always identified with.

NYM: Where would you put yourself on a continuum between Pat Moynihan and Chuck Schumer?

HRC: I know that people often talk about how there's a division between being the senator who fixes potholes and the senator who sees the big issues on the horizon. I don't think there has to be a contradiction there. If you're in the Senate, you have to do both. Oftentimes, what is most local and personal that the government can affect is the way you build trust and faith in government at the ground level. So I think it's important to help people with their Social Security problems or their disability problems or their potholes or their highway interchange or whatever it is that to them symbolizes the government.

But at the same time, it's important to be a leader. When I'm upstate, I obviously talk about the upstate economy. But I also talk about it when I'm downstate. It matters to people in this city that there's been an exodus of people from upstate New York. And the result is, with the loss of population, New York's likely to lose two or three members of Congress in the 2000 redistricting. That's devastating for what I think we need to do for New York.

And then there are issues both nationally and internationally that New Yorkers are concerned about. And there are issues on the horizon that are not yet political issues. I don't have any New Yorkers coming up to me now except in the most specialized circumstances who ask me what my opinion is about the human-genome project. I mean, that's not an issue that's on most New Yorkers' minds. And yet when we get the genome mapped by 2003, or earlier, that's going to have a huge effect on the life of New Yorkers. On teaching hospitals. On research. On insurability. So I want to be someone who is really grounded enough to respond to people's needs and help, and somebody who's going to be a leader in raising issues. So I'd like to be a combination of that.

NYM: I've talked to some Capitol Hill staffers from 1994, and the picture they paint for me of the health-care situation is you, or the White House, insisting on an all-or-nothing package and not being willing to do the compromising and horse-trading that gets legislation passed.

HRC: Well, I'd paint a very different picture. We did what we were asked to do by the leadership, which at that time was Democratic in both the House and the Senate. We had a lot of internal debates about how to proceed. And they wanted us to present a piece of legislation, not just a framework. In retrospect, knowing what I now know, I don't think that was the best way to proceed. But that's what we did. And it was drafted in the basement of the Cannon Building with Hill staffers involved with it every step of the way. It was reviewed and signed off on by the chairmen of the committees. And the plan was that the Republicans would put forth their version, which Senator John Chafee of Rhode Island was in charge of drafting. And Senator Chafee and I had numerous conversations about this. And the plan was that we would introduce our legislation, he would introduce his, and the Congress would, in an act of great, you know, bipartisan achievement, hammer out the differences and come out with whatever the atmosphere would permit.