Clinton faces Senate competition from another female attorney

WHEN Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton comes up for re-election next year, New York voters may well be choosing between a high-powered female attorney with a wayward husband and a high-powered female attorney with a wayward husband.

The strongest potential challenger to emerge in the campaign against the Democratic Clinton is Republican Jeanine Pirro, district attorney in New York’s suburban Westchester County.

Pirro has cultivated a national profile with her work as a prosecutor and her frequent appearances on cable television.

Should she win her party’s nomination over likely conservative opposition to some of her moderate views, it could set up a historic contest in 2006 between two women for the high-profile Senate seat.

Like Clinton, Pirro is a savvy, successful attorney who supports abortion rights and a ban on assault weapons. And like the former first lady, Pirro has ridden out a somewhat rocky marriage.

While former President Bill Clinton had an affair with a White House intern that led to his impeachment, Albert Pirro fathered an out-of-wedlock child and served 11 months in federal prison for tax fraud.

With Pirro as a moderate Republican and Clinton a centrist Democrat, they could compete for many of the same votes, particularly white, suburban women, analysts say.

Those voters may not be swayed by the so-called husband issue, however, even as local tabloids gleefully run cartoons poking fun at the former president’s womanising and the absence of Republican fund-raiser Albert Pirro in any of 103 photographs on his wife’s campaign website.

“If you push her around in terms of her husband, women are going to get pissed off and say she should be judged on her merits,” said political strategist Joseph Mercurio.

But most agree that such a match-up has less to do with who will be a US senator from New York and more to do with who will run for US president in 2008.

Widely expected to be interested in the top job, Clinton has not indicated whether she will seek the Democratic Party’s nomination and says she is concentrating on the Senate race. Nevertheless, Republicans hope to weaken her ahead of the White House contest, said political strategist Hank Sheinkopf.

“The presidential campaign began the day Jeanine Pirro announced her candidacy,” he said.