Hillary Clinton fell short on jobs pledge

WASHINGTON -- When Hillary Rodham Clinton ran for the Senate in 2000, she promised to bring 200,000 jobs to upstate New York.

But between January 2001, when Clinton was sworn in as a senator, and January 2010, when she resigned to become secretary of state, the northern suburbs and upstate region lost more than 100,000 jobs.

Over that same time period, employment declined throughout the nation.

Clinton's tenure as a senator included the recession of 2007-09, when millions of Americans lost jobs.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Clinton's successor, has come up with her own strategy for boosting employment in upstate New York -- a five-part plan to provide federal loans, grants and bonding assistance for local governments, and a new tax credit for agriculture.

But unlike Clinton, Gillibrand isn't predicting how many jobs her plan might create.

"It's very hard to determine, first of all," Gillibrand said. "And second of all, you are going to try to pitch for each piece. And there's never an expectation you are going to get it all done. Your goal is to get the funds. And at the end of the day, the government doesn't create jobs. These small businesses and these manufacturers do. So it's not like we can take credit for it, anyway."