We think she thought we, like all the rest of the press attending her quintessential Upper East Side 92^nd-Street brownstone, were a blue-stater.  It was a press invitation, and we are what we are, despite expectations.  Probably most reporters in NY lean a little, like the Tower of Pisa.  If you cock your head to the side a tidj, you see the building upright and straight – yeah, even without trick photography.

In any case, we were the second shift: Ms. Maloney had already hosted an earlier breakfast meeting, and we were the 10 a.m. contingent for juice, bagels ‘n’ lox, and fruit salad in her cute backyard garden, deep green and leafy in early July.  As for us, even if she didn’t know our proclivities as a non-Dem, as they say, A bit of How come? Is always walcome.  We all signed in to her guest book.  After our question barrage, suddenly all Maloney's assistants knew our e-mail and name.

No latter-day newcomer, Congresswoman Maloney is a fixture in the city, having served in various capacities in Congress (and the Apple) since 1992.  About her, Time has described Ms. Maloney as “a tenacious, resilient legislator.”  For their part, The New York Times gave her some flinty kudos many could proudly engrave on the flats of their senior-class anklets: 

New York’s Congressional delegation stands out for its moxie, kind of the way New Yorkers themselves often do. Among the brashest members is Rep. Carolyn Maloney, Democrat of Manhattan.   

She is recognized as a national leader with accomplishments in financial services (Money Magazine quipped of her:  “[T]he best friend a credit-card user ever had[.]”), national security, the economy, and women’s issues. Maloney has authored more than 60 measures, either standalones or as hitchhiker language incorporated into larger bills.  Currently serving as regional whip in the House Democratic Caucus, she takes her fair share of incoming.

A current pet cause, co-sponsored by Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), is for a first national women’s history museum in the nation’s capital.  It met nearly unanimous opposition from GOP stalwarts, spearheaded by Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), on grounds that such a museum would champion radical left-wing issues and causes (pro-abortion, anti-gun, anti-traditional marriage, etc.) and would thus run athwart conservative values held by millions of the nation’s women.  Yet the tax monies of all the republic would be supporting this one-sided facility.  Maloney was not histrionic; she quietly offered shrugs and plausible-deniability pauses, negatives aimed at the GOP on this as well as related issues discussed during the meeting.

She started out telling us her legislative efforts to improve the city, one of which is to bar the practice of tanning shops from servicing underage children.  No quarrel there: tanning has been shown to provide opportunities for skin cancer when used in practically any increment.  Is the quick and dirty tan worth the agita about skin disorders?  Possible cancer?  Not much argument on this issue, though tanning salons – like cigarettes – are legal.

But her other assertions, less safe if taken at face value, would mislead.  We owe $16 trillion, she said once or twice.  The truth, as anyone paying attention (even Democrats) knows, is that we owe now over $17.5 trillion and climbing.  She repeated that false mantra that “our debt is shrinking.”  Only to the unsighted.

Asked by another scrivener what the biggest problem is facing government today, she replied, “The import-export issue.”  Well, blow us down.  It’s meant to help small business export more goods – but it is meeting opposition.  Our assist came to explain why it’s a nonstarter: “The forest of over-regulation is a killer.”  In six years, over 8,000 new regs to handcuff business under the regime.

Her quietly interposed efforts on behalf of “gun safety” elicited our questions as to whether she meant “trigger mechanisms and gun-stock handling traits,” but clearly she meant, as she later slowly verified, gun control.  To call gun control gun safety is a smart move, since language confuses and disarms the naïve and unaware.  At base, after we pursued the issue to clarify her language, it turned out to be the same anti-NRA and 2^nd Amendment wrathfulness expressed so often by the president, Mr. Biden, and ex-Mayor Bloomberg in NYC.

“GOP” and “NRA” and “Republican” vied for 4-letter vilified place of bottom-feeder honor in the early-morning, pleasant, leafy garden on East 92^nd.

She announced, No president ever has deported as many people as this president.  Flat-out wrong.  We have a literal influx of aliens and undocumented non-Americans on the one hand, flooding in like the regular high tide at Penobscot.  Then we have the super-invasion of up to 90,000 underage kids without papers, documentation, health clearance, parents, goals, education, or interest in anything but parroting that they came  because of “turmoil” and “violence” in their “home country.”  That’s a script they are tutored to recite en route to the southern U.S. border.

Frankly, even if this president does, by some miracle of New Math, deport a number of illegals, it is no match for the vast invasion of the past several years under the Obama regnum.  He started the influx with his inopportune but nefarious statement that “No unaccompanied child making it to this country will be deported.”  Voilà!  Abracadabra: all the parents in the Central American isthmus shouted “hola!” and “olé!” and shipped their untutored progeny north through 1,800 to 2,500 miles of desert, mountains, scrubble, and Mexican police with a handy Uncle Coyote.

Maloney took issue with the immense SCOTUS Hobby Lobby decision.  As expected.  She could not scope the other side of the issue, that religious and faith-based businesses might have a protected right to not support actions and mandates that directly contradict their faith doctrines.  A wave of the hand when we brought that up.  Whatever.

One empathizes with the attractive, slim, elegantly understated Maloney.  She lost her husband, Cliff – a Republican, in fact – four years ago in a tragic hypoxia death when he summited one of the world’s great peaks.  According to friends at the briefing, she still acutely misses him.  It is difficult enough to live, eat, and breathe politics without one’s beloved spouse being taken.

Asked about future presidential candidates, Maloney’s voice took on that vibrato of awe Democrats acquire when speaking of their empress of desire.  “Why do you like Hillary Clinton?” we asked.  “Three reasons: she’s smart.  She’s hard-working.  And…she’s fun!”

Everybody in the elevator in NYC, Connecticut, and Massachusetts is smart.  Likely smarter than Hillary – they would not have both feet in their oral cavities every time they opened their mouths (“We’re flat broke” and “We pay ordinary taxes like everyone else” and “We struggled to pay the mortgages for our houses and Chelsea’s education” – so very boo-hoo).

GOP consultant Roger Stone’s new book (Nixon's Secrets:  The Rise, Fall and Untold Truth about the President, Watergate, and the Pardon, by Roger Stone and Mike Colapietro, Aug. 11, 2014) on the 40^th anniversary of Watergate notes how Hillary was fired as staff attorney from the House Judiciary Committee for writing fraudulent legal briefs, lying to investigators, confiscating and compromising public documents, and various other falsifications.  Wow.  Quel résumé.  She also hung out as a collegian with the über-resistible socialist radical, the mentor of the burgeoning, well-connected radical choom-gang-congregating, no-woman-dating young Barry Soetoro, Saul Alinsky, who offered her a job working in his lair.  Dinesh D’Souza’s new documentary, America, notes that she turned the Alinsky seat-warmer job down, which may have been the shrewdest move she had made until then.

What of her “hard work”?  All in the Congress earn their keep, excepting only the shepherd of the Constitution in the WH.  Yes, she may work hard, but her accomplishments are a slender and transparent reed.  Nothing to call even a residuum after all this “work.”  No legislation.  No healing of enemies back to the U.S. side.  Nothing but air mileage for all the schlepping and carousing she did as sec. of state.  No lasting legacy of any kind.  (Except Benghazi, not precisely a medal of honor.)

Finally, Hillary is “fun”?  What to make of that?  Have cackling and denial, lying under oath, and swallowing a husband’s serial infidelity become sudden requirements of ascent to the presidency?  In any case, whatever “fun” may be had in her Martha’s Vineyard or Chappaqua company, it must be an acquired taste.  Her security detail from the Clinton WH years limned nothing “fun” about working for her.  White House Staffer Dick Morris has no laff-meter view of her behind-the-scenes fellowship or joviality to report.

Quite, in fact, the contrary.

In any case, Maloney recounted how many ”banged at [her] brownstone door” when Maloney threw a party for the impoverished, destitute Ms. C.  “We were packed, and still, more people kept trying to get in!” Maloney recalls.  Her brownstone, tidy, well-appointed, and actually not very large, can on a good day fit perhaps 100 people – all skinny and standing up.  A “packed crowd” in her brownstone is impressive only if acknowledged terrorist/Weather Underground bomber/sometime-rapist William Ayers’s sponsoring the young Barry S.H. Obama for office umpteen years ago in his Chicago living room is impressive.  In other words: not very.  Not even to BHO, in recollection in one of his ghosted books.

Maloney does work hard.  A pity she does not toil for most of the virtuous causes many on the non-heavily radicalized other side champion.