VANITY FAIR NOMINATES Jerry Nadler

BECAUSE, as the four-term congressional representative of Manhattan's West Side, he's liberalism the way it oughta be, a far cry from both the blanded-out, airport-Ramada rightcentrism of Bill Clinton and the naive, pierced-tongue stridency of the Lollapalooza kids, BECAUSE he called into question New York State's headlong rush to develop the Hudson River's rotting West Side piers into a public-commercial complex, suggesting that the Army Corps of Engineers first issue an Environmental Impact Statement. BECAUSE he wants the Hudson River Park to be a park, not the honky-tonk retail strip some developers envision, nor another grim, Robert Moses-style car-culture desecration of urban public space, BECAUSE last fall, despite having no great love for Clinton, he unhesitatingly denounced the House's impeachment of the president as a "partisan coup d'etat" while more conciliatory Democrats waited to see what their constituents wanted them to say. BECAUSE, as the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law, he's in favor of giving that horrid independent-counsel statute a good seeing-to. BECAUSE, through his accomplishments and deeds, he has managed to render irrelevant what you can't help but notice about him: his considerable girth, BECAUSE he got wise to Dick Morris, his former friend and roommate, long before the rest of us (they haven't been close since the 1970s). BECAUSE he is a Yankees fan, yet, unlike another blustery New York City politician we know, he has made no attempt to claim the team's successes as his own. BECAUSE he takes New York wit, causticity, and intellectualism to a place where they are acutely needed: Washington, D.C.

DAVID KAMP