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I swallowed and nodded. A second ago, chatting with the other moms in the press corps, it had seemed like talking about potty-training was the most natural thing in the world. But now that Hillary had repeated it back to me, I was starting to feel ridiculous. I mean, I had just told the first lady that I potty-trained my two-year-old! What an absurd thing to do! What the hell was wrong with me?

But I needn’t have worried. Now that Hillary realized she’d heard me right, she looked around at the small group and said, emphatically, with a big smile, “This woman deserves a round of applause!” Then she turned back to me. “Boy or girl, Beth?”

“Boy,” I answered, not sure whether it would be better to disappear from the face of the earth right now or soldier on.

“Boy? That’s even harder!” she replied, laughing, then turned her attention elsewhere.

When I finally got to see a tape of the Channel 2 segment on “The New Hillary,” I saw why Marcia had included the exchange. The point was that Hillary was trying to make connections with us, to humanize herself, and that when she dropped the formality and the regal air, she could be warm and funny and caring, and yes, even at ease in a conversation about potty-training. I still felt slightly foolish, but I also couldn’t help but wonder: If it had been Chuck Schumer or Al D’Amato or Mayor Giuliani that I was covering instead of Hillary, and one of them had asked me how my vacation had been, would it have seemed as natural to respond as I did? And if I had, would they actually have bothered to continue the discussion as if it were a perfectly legitimate topic, the way Hillary did, or would they have put me in a slot in their minds for keeping track of mentally unbalanced reporters and moved on to someone else?

***

It’s a Sunday morning and I’m with Hillary. And that means I’m in a black church, because that’s where Hillary goes every Sunday between Labor Day and Election Day. Some days we start with the seven a.m. service and hit our sixth or seventh church around mid-afternoon, but today the schedule is light: Just three churches before noon, and then I can go back to the office and write yet another story about the lovefest between Hillary and the black community.

We begin this morning at Memorial Baptist Church in Harlem. It’s not one of the powerhouse churches Democratic politicians usually visit; but then, Hillary, overachiever that she is, isn’t content to hit a half-dozen churches like a normal candidate. Instead, in the two months leading up to November 7, she’ll hit twenty-seven -- count ‘em, twenty-seven -- black churches, from storefront tabernacles where the paint is peeling in neighborhoods where few white politicians venture, to better-known places like Abyssinian Baptist, run by Reverend Calvin Butts, a prominent activist and power-broker who once made headlines by calling Giuliani a “racist.”

As always, the row of seats taken up by the press corps is just about the only part of the church occupied by white faces. Occasionally a black photographer or reporter is part of the mix, but today we are not only mostly white, we also happen to be largely Jewish. And because it’s the Sunday after Rosh Hashanah, we greet each other by saying, “Happy New Year!”

Most of the worshippers are on their feet, clapping, singing and rocking to an electric guitar, piano and drum ensemble driven by the steady, happy jangle of a tambourine. “Lift Him up!” the several hundred voices sing as one, and within minutes, I and most of the other reporters stand up too, clapping and swaying along with them; the music is irresistible. Still, we are interlopers, journalists in a place of worship and mostly white people in a place filled with black faces, and no matter what we do, we feel self-conscious.

Soon the booming sounds die away and we sit down. The Reverend Preston Washington gets up and shouts: “Let’s give them all the news!” and the congregation -- the men in dark jackets and ties and dress shoes and the ladies in satiny jewel-toned skirt suits with matching hats -- lets out a cheer in response.

The reporter sitting next to me gives me a mock-look of bewilderment. “Did he just say, ‘Let’s welcome all the Jews?’”

I stifle a laugh. He’s joking, but it’s clear that he feels, like I do, how conspicuous we are, a buncha white people talking about Rosh Hashana in a black church, dancing like robots. “No,” I reply, “he said, ‘Let’s give them all the news.’ All the news, as in the Gospel, not all the Jews.”

Now Hillary appears at the podium, a small, familiar blonde figure in her going-to-church navy-blue suit with the skirt hem falling just below her kneecap. It’s the Sunday version of her black pantsuit, her uniform for the job she’s assigned herself today. A tumultuous cheer goes up, and a warm, wide, toothy, lipsticked smile blooms across her face.

“She’s gonna win,” declares the pastor. “And we are going to come out in droves for her.”

It’s a point that needs to be made. Nobody is doubting that black voters prefer Hillary over Lazio. But black turnout is unreliable in New York City. David Dinkins, the city’s only black mayor, beat Giuliani when black voters made up twenty-eight percent of the electorate. But Dinkins lost four years later when black voters made up just twenty-one percent of those who showed up at the polls. So the get-out-the-vote message is why we’re here, and the pastor knows it.

“Whoooo!” Hillary hoots as the applause dies down and she looks around, feeling the love. “Thank you for the day the Lord has made!”

It’s her standard opening line, a riff on the psalm that begins “This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it,” and it goes over as big here as it does in every other church she’s ever said it in.

“My Baptist husband says, ‘Good morning!’” she continues. (Hillary, as anyone in the press corps and most of the people in this church could tell you, is Methodist.) The reference to Bill -- whose popularity in the black community is legendary -- unleashes another ovation.

She throws out a few thank-yous to local politicians in the audience, most of them introduced as “My good friend so-and-so,” and then lowers her voice and eyes, taking on a solemn aspect that is immediately sensed by the congregation, which becomes completely silent and respectful and still.

“I want to thank you,” she says in a small, humble, grateful voice, “for the prayers and support and good wishes you have given me and my husband and my daughter over the last eight years. Those prayers have uplifted, sustained, and I believe, protected us.”

A smattering of applause and a murmur of acknowledgement ripples through the congregation. They are flattered and impressed. The first lady of the United States, the most famous woman in the world, has not only found her way to their small church on 115th Street this morning, but now she is thanking them. Now that’s worth coming to church for.

I tune back into Hillary’s speech at Memorial Baptist. Now she’s reciting some statistics from the Clinton Administration’s economic miracle: The lowest child poverty level on record. The lowest level of African-American unemployment on record. More applause, then the self-congratulations gives way to a humble message in keeping with the spirit of a religious service.

“But I don’t believe that America is called upon to be the richest nation,” she says, pausing as a few voices call back, “That’s right!” and “You tell it!”

““I believe it is called upon to be the best,” she continues. “And I believe our best days are ahead of us. That’s why I’m running for the Senate. I want to be part of making that future.”

Now we are about to hear the press corps’ favorite part of Hillary’s Standard Sunday Morning Sermon. She starts by noting that she’s been to all sixty-two counties in New York State, and that one of the many places she visited along the way was Auburn, to see the house that Harriet Tubman lived in after escaping slavery.

Harriet Tubman, Hillary adds, “is one of my favorite heroines in American history. Because when she got to freedom, she didn’t say, ‘Well, I’m free. I’m just gonna sit back and live the good life,’ did she?”

“No, she didn’t,” several voices respond.

“She decided to go back to the South and bring more escaped slaves to freedom,” Hillary continues.

“Mm-hmm!” the worshippers call back.

Now her voice drops to a stage whisper and she looks conspiratorially around the room, as if we are all on the Underground Railroad with Hillary and Harriet. Everyone becomes still again.

“She’d tell people to meet her at night in a swamp or a grove of willow trees. And she’d say, ‘If you hear the dogs, keep going!’” Hillary says, her voice slowly rising.

“Yes! Yes!” the audience calls back.

I don’t need to take notes any more. I just write, “Keep going!” in my notebook, put my pen down, and listen for the words that I and every other reporter here know by heart.

“If you hear the gunfire, keep going! If you hear the men shouting, keep going! If you hear the footsteps, keep going!”

She gets louder and louder in order to be heard over the growing din, but her cadence is as perfect as a real preacher’s, every pause timed just right to allow for a response from the audience. We may feel like we don’t belong here, us white reporters sitting in the back row, but that white lady in the front of the church, she’s perfectly at home. She knows how to reach this audience, and even though when you come down to it, this is simply a sophisticated plea for votes, they sense that she respects them. It doesn’t hurt her comfort level that she’s spent years going around to churches in Arkansas with Bill. And it doesn’t hurt that she’s been on the campaign trail for over a year. In the early days of covering Hillary, we talked a lot about her tin ear. She’d drone on too long, she’d say the wrong thing, her message was clunky or vague. But in politics as in school, there is a learning curve, and we are seeing the result of it right now. Today, the first lady has perfect pitch, and her routine is going over big-time with the fans.