Hillary Clinton shrugs off her male rivals' attacks
Thursday, October 18th 2007, 4:00 AM
Hillary Clinton says certain men have been noticing her - and hinted she kind of likes it.
WASHINGTON - Hillary Clinton says certain men have been noticing her - and hinted she kind of likes it.
"The last couple of weeks I've been getting a lot of attention from the men in this race," she said, referring to the steady stream of jabs she's taken from rivals Rudy Giuliani, John Edwards and Barack Obama.
Edwards and Obama, her Democratic rivals, have ripped into her policy proposals and painted her as part of the problem in Washington.
Giuliani, the GOP front-runner, has increasingly used the former First Lady as a liberal prop to burnish his conservative bona fides.
"At first I didn't know what to make of it," Clinton, who turns 60 next week, quipped.
"And then a good friend of mine said, 'You know, when you get to be our age, having that much attention from all these men ...,'" she said, leaving the last line up to the imaginations of about 1,000 women filling a ballroom at the Capital Hilton.
The crowd, full of people who paid a minimum of $1,000 each to be there, roared with laughter.
Clinton has deployed coy quips before. In January, she let Iowa supporters draw their own conclusions about "what in my background equips me to deal with evil and bad men."
She offered arched eyebrows, a smile and a knowing nod, leaving many in the crowd to believe she was talking about the marital transgressions of her husband, Bill Clinton. She later said she was just trying to be "funny."
Wednesday, Clinton insisted she wouldn't be firing back at the sniping rivals, who trail her in recent national polls.
"I'm not interested in attacking anyone," Clinton said. "I'm interested in attacking the problems of our country and solving those problems and working together."
Her new high-road pledge contrasts sharply with an earlier promise: If anyone attacked her, she'd "deck 'em."
But she had no qualms about hitting Republicans who have criticized the 12-year-old Maryland boy who delivered a recent Democratic radio address calling for a beefed-up children's health insurance program - a contentious issue on Capitol Hill.
"I've obviously gotten used to being attacked myself, and I don't mind being attacked, but they should not be attacking children," she said, casting herself as a defender and uniter.
Clinton's rebuke mirrored the shots Giuliani took at her last month when he tried to link Clinton's critical congressional quizzing of Gen. David Petraeus to a MoveOn.org newspaper ad challenging the integrity of the U.S. commander in Iraq.
Giuliani accused her of injecting "political venom" into the war debate.
Clinton's female-focused fund-raiser pumped a whopping $1.5million into her already bulging campaign war chest.
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