Churchill: Why did Gillibrand flop? Upstate made her do it

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Geography is destiny. It might also be responsible for opinions you come to regret.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said as much when profiled Sunday by "60 Minutes." She faulted the "lens of upstate New York" for positions she once held but now finds inconvenient and embarrassing.

Take gun control.

As a congresswoman from a district that included much of Rensselaer and Saratoga counties, Gillibrand was such a staunch Second Amendment supporter that she earned an "A" rating from the National Rifle Association. The Democrat even boasted that she and her husband kept rifles under their bed.

Gillibrand's position flipped when David Paterson appointed her to the Senate. Why?

"I went down to Brooklyn to meet with families who had suffered from gun violence in their communities," Gillibrand told interviewer Sharyn Alfonsi. "And you immediately experience the feeling that I couldn't have been more wrong — you know, I only had the lens of upstate New York."

Gillibrand's family property along Noonan Lane is a rock toss from Albany's South End, where gun violence is not uncommon. She had to go to Brooklyn to understand its impact?

Those upstate lenses must have been blinders.

Later in the interview, Alfonsi asked Gillibrand to account for a similar flop on immigration. When Gillibrand was in the House, you could mistake her positions for xenophobia.

She was against sanctuary cities. She opposed amnesty of any kind for illegal immigrants. She wanted to make English the country's official language. She supported deputizing local police officers to enforce federal immigration law.

But when she joined the Senate, Gillibrand immediately ditched those positions. Why?

You guessed it. She lived upstate. She couldn't know any better, until her lens changed.

"I came from a district that was 98 percent white," she told Alfonsi. "We have immigrants, but not a lot of immigrants. And I hadn't really spent the time to hear those kinds of stories about what it's like to worry that your dad could be taken away at any moment."

Gillibrand makes it seem as though she dropped out of Podunk High School in East Adirondack, then took a waitressing job at the town diner. You would think she had no exposure to the world beyond some little upstate hamlet.

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Her experiences and resume say otherwise.

Albany is more diverse now than when Gillibrand was growing up, but it was hardly homogeneous. She went on to Emma Willard and Dartmouth, top-notch schools where her instructors presumably taught her about the broader world.

From there, she attended law school in Los Angeles — the nation's immigration capital — before spending a decade in polyglot New York City. Gillibrand was fairly new to her upstate district and its apparently parochial voters when she ran for Congress.

"I just didn't take the time to understand these issues because they weren't in front of me," Gillibrand said on the CBS show. "And that was my fault. It was something that I'm embarrassed about and I'm ashamed of."

That Gillibrand admitted to feeling ashamed brought significant attention. It seems like refreshing candor.

But if it's true that Gillibrand didn't take the time to understand immigration issues, it was nothing less than a dereliction of her duties.

For one thing, the many farms in Gillibrand's old district depend on migrant labor. Immigration policy is a hugely important in places such as Columbia County and a frequent topic of debate.

Second, Gillibrand cosponsored important immigration legislation while in the House — including the SAVE Act, which, among other measures, would have hastened deportations of illegal immigrants. The bill could have impacted millions of lives, and Gillibrand didn't bother to really grasp the issue? That's the excuse she's choosing?

Much of "60 Minutes" profile focused on President Trump, with whom Gillibrand has publicly sparred. The conflict, along with Gillibrand's laudable work combating sexual assault in the military and elsewhere, has elevated her 2020 presidential profile.

Her looming candidacy was why she was on "60 Minutes," of course.

During the interview, Gillibrand said Trump's immigration policies are racist, even though, as we've discussed, many of her pre-2009 views were just as harsh. So I asked Gillibrand's office if it would be accurate to also describe her former positions as racist, and if she risked insulting some of her constituents by blaming those stances on "the lens of upstate."

I didn't receive an answer by deadline.

Of course, Gillibrand's claims about why she flopped are preposterous. Really, she just made the cynical calculation common to politicians, one they are loathe to admit.

When Gillibrand ran for Congress, she adopted positions that gave her the best chance to win. When she was appointed to the Senate and faced a new set of voters, those same positions became a liability. So she changed them.

It's no more complicated than that.