Forget It, Senator. It's Chinatown.

When then-Representative Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) was promoted by Governor David Patterson to the U.S. Senate, a lot of New Yorkers were skeptical. She was a one-term Congresswoman from a rural upstate district ... what did she know about representing the huge and incredibly diverse Empire State, especially the polyglot metropolis that dominates the state's southern tier (Yonkers)?

But Senator Gillibrand has had a card up her sleeve this whole time. It seems that she has a special connection with New York's Chinese community, which makes up 6.7% of the state's population.

It is customary for politicians eager to connect with ethnic voters to butcher a few words in Spanish, Chinese or other foreign tongues. But Ms. Gillibrand is no ordinary politician when it comes to linguistic and cultural comfort: as an Asian studies major at Dartmouth, she studied for six months in China and Taiwan, becoming proficient enough to absorb stories in Chinese newspapers, and later spent four months in Hong Kong as a corporate lawyer.

Now a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Ms. Gillibrand has come a long way from her days in China and Taiwan as Lu Tian Na, an exuberant adventurer who sucked down toad venom to counteract poisonous crabs from Beidaihe beach (about 180 miles east of Beijing), and who rode helmetless on a motorcycle in polluted Taipei. But those experiences deepened her appreciation for different cultures, Ms. Gillibrand said in an interview, and helped to shape her views on relations between the United States and China.

Gillibrand will almost certainly face a tough election to win the seat in her own right in 2010. But we think with her unique background, she has a clear advantage.

Can't you see the debate scenario? The moderator asks the candidates to declare, once and for all, if they have ever sucked down toad venom ...

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