A Long Talk With New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand

Photo: Celeste Sloman/Redux “Money is a symptom of the problem, it’s the love of money that’s the evil” in politics, says Kirsten Gillibrand, the New York senator running for president. Or, technically speaking, still exploring a run. “The money in politics is just the juice on which the game is played.” We’re at a corner table in a crowded Le Pain Quotidien just off of Central Park South on a cold and rainy Sunday morning, and Gillibrand is just recently back from another swing through Iowa. She’s also in the middle of a campaign fundraising blitz, and she’s about to return to Washington to promote legislation that would make the compensation fund for victims of the September 11 attacks permanent. The next night, she’ll appear on Fox News, where she’ll spar with Chris Wallace over a coming fundraising event she’s holding with a Pfizer executive. It’s been over a month since the senator, who won her second full term in November, announced she would run[1] on Stephen Colbert’s show, and other patrons keep peeking over their croissants, clearly pretty sure they recognize her. After the 2016 election, Gillibrand reminds me, she started traveling New York to hear from citizens about what went wrong. “I got a much bigger sense of how deep the dissatisfaction and disillusionment was,” she says. The former congresswoman is far from a front-runner — she’s polling around one percent nationally, according to the RealClearPolitics average — but she’s among the bigger names in the race, she has yet to hold any sort of formal campaign kickoff, and activists in the early-voting states are taking her candidacy seriously. “[I] recognized that a lot of the solutions that we had been offering over the last five or ten years weren’t enough,” she says, “weren’t bold enough, weren’t significant enough to

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