By Michael Powell and Thomas B. Edsall
Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Republican prosecutor Jeanine Pirro's once-promising campaign for the U.S. Senate seat held by Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) is lingering somewhere between the critical list and terminal.

The latest bad news came yesterday when county Republican leaders emerged from a meeting and recommended that Pirro put aside her senatorial ambitions and concentrate on an office she might win, such as state attorney general. Only four months ago these county leaders urged her to challenge Clinton. (Republican Gov. George E. Pataki, who has endorsed Pirro, also has told confidants that he is pessimistic about Pirro's prospects.)

Even the Republicans' words of comfort sounded less than comforting.

"Jeanine Pirro is not dead," state GOP Chairman Stephen Minarik assured the Associated Press. "She's living and breathing."

Pirro said nothing publicly, issuing an e-mail statement noting that she remains a candidate. She thanked the chairmen for their "confidence in my abilities as a statewide candidate."

It's a quick undoing for Pirro, who is a popular three-term district attorney in Westchester, a leafy and well-heeled suburban county just north of New York City. Her campaign got off to an inauspicious start, as she misplaced a page of her speech and fell absolutely silent for 32 seconds during her televised announcement. Fundraising lagged, and then came the stories, well known but immediately recycled, about her husband, Albert Pirro Jr., who hauls a steamer trunk's worth of political baggage.

He is an influential lobbyist and a convicted felon who served 11 months in prison for hiding $1 million in taxable income. He claimed dozens of luxury items -- including his Ferrari and her Mercedes-Benz, as well as the salaries of employees who care for their pet pigs -- as business expenses. He also acknowledged some years ago that he had fathered a child out of wedlock, but only after being confronted with the DNA evidence.

Even Jeanine Pirro's reputation as a social moderate in New York, a state trending steadily more Democratic, hurt as she tried to round up Republican support. She supports abortion rights and favors an assault-gun ban and preserving Social Security. None of that pleased upstate Republicans or the politically influential Conservative Party, which wields much influence in Republican circles.

Reached in his liquor store in Brooklyn, Conservative Party Chairman Michael Long said he likes Pirro, but not as a Senate candidate. "The press was looking at a catfight between two powerful women, okay?" Long said. "But I'm not looking for cats, I'm looking to elect conservative people to statewide office. I told her she's not a natural fit."

The Republican Jewish Coalition announced plans yesterday to buy full-page ads in major newspapers to counter what it called a "misleading and wrong" statement from the Union of Reform Judaism critical of the Bush administration and the war in Iraq. The ad carries the signatures of 180 leaders and prominent figures in the Jewish community.

"The reform movement does not speak for all Jews, or for all Reform Jews," declared the coalition's executive director, Matt Brooks. "Many American Jews support this president and recognize that Iraq is the central battle in the war on terror."

Among those signing the newspaper ad are two former chairmen of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, James Tisch and Kenneth Bialkin.

The coalition is unhappy with a statement, approved nearly unanimously last month by about 2,000 members at a convention in Houston, that said in part that "American Jews, and all Americans, are profoundly critical of this war and they want this Administration to tell us how and when it will bring our troops home."

The union's president, Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie, said: "The sentiment was clear and overwhelming."