The Fantasy of a Celebrity Politician:
Cynthia Nixon’s “Mirandized” Bid for
New York Governor
Cynthia Nixon’s “Mirandized” Bid for
New York Governor
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By Rudy Malcom, Intern Writer
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Edited By Kiara Timo-Vaughn, Lead Editorial Intern
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“I want all the girls watching here, now, to know that a new day is on the horizon!” Oprah Winfrey declared on January 7, 2018, at the Golden Globe Awards. She was accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Award, a life achievement honor presented annually to the recipient who has made “outstanding contributions to the world of entertainment,” but her powerful speech about sexual abuse led many viewers to speculate that she would run against Donald Trump for President in 2020. Might the Democratic Party bring forward its own celebrity for The Republic’s highest executive office?
Although Oprah will not be fulfilling this popular wish, Steve Bannon, who formerly served as the alt-right Breitbart News’ executive chairman and the Trump administration’s White House Chief Strategist, described her on July 18 as Trump’s biggest potential foe in the 2020 presidential election. (It’s ironic that, in a 1999 interview with Larry King, Trump named Oprah as his “first choice” for a running mate should he ever run for President.) “I think we’re in a different era,” Bannon said. “I think we’re in an era that media and understanding media and understanding how to communicate on a mass basis to the American people is so much more important than being in a state legislat[ure].” |
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Each the other’s foil, Trump and media mogul Oprah, according to Vox staff writer Constance Grady, symbolize “two poles of the fantasy of the celebrity president, one of America’s favorite daydreams.” Trump evokes “rage and resentment,” Oprah “wisdom and kindness and empathy.” Whereas he is “the product of intergenerational failsonry [sic] & legitimately rich,” she is “black, a woman, unabashed, loved, genuinely self-made” — “the anti-Trump,” tweeted Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marshall.
Whereas Trump personifies “the reality–tinged understanding of the American dream” that it’s “not actual hard work that makes you successful, but the ability to evince the feeling and effect of power and wealth,” BuzzFeed observed, Oprah has “made the American Dream seem increasingly attainable,” wrote author Nicole Aschoff. “When we fantasize about electing a celebrity for president,” Grady illuminates, “we’re not imagining that Oprah is secretly a brilliant legislator... We’re imagining that the perfect, untouchable, and morally righteous figure of our dreams can stride straight off the screen into the White House and make everything better” — that a celebrity savior can make America great again.
But the expectation for a single knight on a white horse (or, perhaps more fittingly, a blue donkey or red elephant) to come galloping down Pennsylvania Avenue with a panacea for America’s social ills is nothing new. Today’s fantasy of a celebrity president is possibly an exaggeration of the modern concept of the presidency that emerged in the 1930s.
President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs enlarged the federal government’s role in all facets of public life, thereby inspiring a common expectation of presidential omnipotence that downplays the constitutional system of checks and balances and even the legislative branch altogether. (Trump played into this misconception at the Republican National Convention, where he declared, “I alone can fix it.” In reality, try unseating your congressperson “if you really want a better Washington DC,” Medium advises.)
FDR revolutionized the public’s perception of the presidency in part by addressing the nation through a series of radio broadcasts between 1933 and 1944. (Imagine a less contemporary and infinitely superior version of our current president’s Twitter account.) The fireside chats enabled FDR to boost not only his approval ratings, but the country’s morale, even as it weathered the Great Depression and World War II, because of the familiarity with which he spoke. He amplified his voice, policies, and image in “the American consciousness and way of life” and became an unprecedented media figure, narrated The Atlantic. Fast forward to the 21st century, however, and “the line between elected official and celebrity” is unclear; tabloids and gossip websites, says Complex, cover “every aspect of political life, from legislation to sex scandals.”
So much so that the first individual without prior government or military experience was elected President of the United States in 2016. Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center concluded that “policy issues accounted for 10 percent of the news coverage” during the general election.
“If [Clinton] had a policy agenda, it was not apparent in the news,” it discovered.
Discussions of both Trump and Clinton’s policy positions and other criteria indicating fitness for office, such as the latter’s “lengthy record of public service,” were dwarfed by obsessive reporting on their horse race. Scholar C. Anthony Broh, in 1980, explained horse race journalism, which apparently peaked in the last general presidential election.
“A horse is judged not by its absolute speed or skill but in comparison to the speed of other horses, and especially by its wins and losses,” he wrote. “Similarly, candidates are pushed to discuss other candidates; events are understood in a context of competition; and picking the winner becomes an important topic. The race—not the winner—is the story.”
“Important issues of public policy may go unnoticed if the candidates agree on a position, and conversely, seemingly unimportant issues may receive undue attention because they fit the horse-race metaphor,” he added. (Read: Clinton’s emails.)
It’s only natural, then, for Oprah to be considered a viable presidential candidate; who could make a better horse than someone who transformed the tabloid talk show genre and made a career out of publicizing the private, when celebrities, as The Conversation explains, dictate public opinion by functioning as a beacon of light for “time-starved consumers”? Advertisers spend millions globally on celebrity endorsements because famous people conjure positive associations due to their semblances of attractiveness and credibility. Politicians have essentially become universally distrusted, disrespected, and detested; however, as demonstrated by the fact that Oprah’s support of Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary won him 1 million extra votes, we place inordinate confidence in celebrities, who we love to think are just like us. We have “developed a sense of affinity” with them, suggests Professor Mark Wheeler at London Metropolitan University.
The British Psychological Society (BPS) consolidated several research studies in order to further detail psychological factors behind the rise of celebrity politician: “a sign of our political decline,” according to The Guardian. The BPS analyzed the advent of “audience democracy,” perhaps a symptom of horse-race journalism, whereby personalities and performance overshadow political party and competence.
In a similar vein, the media no longer frames issues as related to ideology or party line; instead, it attributes them to the opinions of individual politicians. One reason, the BPS specified, is that social networking sites “offer new opportunities” for parasocial interactions (PSIs) — the “relationships that the public establishes” with real and fictional characters in the media — between voters and politicians, who can, for example, engage in virtual conversation (for example, by tweeting directly to each other). Twitter and the like lead audience members to feel even more strongly that “they are somehow part of the events portrayed.” Moreover, “[g]etting to know a candidate through their presence in the media” can promote the development of PSIs and “a sense of intimacy.” Grady explored how Ronald Reagan, for example, crafted a star image during his acting career “practically designed for the presidency: all twinkling avuncular eyes and an air of condescending father-knows-best-competence.”
This impression of trust is magnified, the BPS continued, when the politician is not linked to any scandals, over which both mainstream news and tabloids obsess. This phenomenon engenders politicians to enter a “vicious cycle” in which they must quest for “individual (non-scandal-related) coverage” in order to hone their brands, as if products being sold. Forget the single knight on a blue donkey or red elephant; the news has turned politics into a butcher shop where candidates are mangled donkey and elephant carcasses colored by their increasingly scrutinized private lives and affairs.
Actor and advocate Cynthia Nixon, best known for playing lawyer Miranda Hobbes on Sex and the City, declared her candidacy to become the first woman and openly LGBTQ governor of New York on Twitter on March 19. Within 18 minutes, The New York Times reported, the challenger to Democratic two-term incumbent Andrew Cuomo became “the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter in New York, and then nationwide 20 minutes after that.” Nixon, who proclaimed herself a democratic socialist to Politico on July 10, has been marketing herself “as the progressive alternative to the party machine,” described The New York Daily News; she has characterized Cuomo as a sell-out to corporate interests and wealthy donors, to whom he has “given massive tax breaks.” Although actors have nourished the rise of an audience democracy that trivializes party line, this actor has raised the question of whether Cuomo’s heart truly bleeds blue.
Her campaign won’t be receiving any corporate contributions and likes to boast that it raised more small donations in its first 24 hours than Cuomo has during his seven years in office; nevertheless, Cuomo has over $31 million filling his pockets and the legacy of his thrice-elected governor father inextricably sewn onto his sleeve. Nixon’s gubernatorial bid, says The New York Times, is a “huge undertaking.”
It’s no surprise, then, that, at the Democrats’ nominating convention on May 23, Cuomo won 95% of the party members’ votes, prompting Nixon, who failed to meet the 25% delegate threshold, to launch a petition for a spot on the ballot for the September 13 primary. (She filed over 65,000 signatures on July 12 — more than quadruple the 15,000 required.) It’s no surprise, then, that Quinnipiac University found on July 18 that 77% of Democrats said they preferred “experience” over someone “new to politics,” or that Cuomo leads Nixon two-to-one, ahead by 31 points “across every part of the ideological spectrum, every region, every racial group, every age, and among both men and women,” according to Siena College Research Institute’s July 31 survey of likely Democratic primary voters. Yet Nixon’s campaign contested the poll’s veracity, alleging that it didn’t account for progressive women voters who are “consistently outperforming expectations in Democratic primaries.” Fellow democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for instance, defeated 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary for New York’s 14th congressional district this June; Time designated her victory as “the biggest upset of the 2018 elections so far.” And, as Ocasio-Cortez told The Intercept, “You can’t really beat big money with more money.” For progressives to win, she said in an interview with Democracy Now, they must not scurry to the center, but instead expand the electorate by “speaking to those that feel disenchanted, dejected, cynical about our politics, and letting them know that we’re fighting for them.” Nixon, whose rhetoric has depicted Cuomo “as a centrist and Albany insider” and herself as someone running for a “New York for the many, not just the few,” appears to be doing just that.
It also appears that Cuomo is taking notes — and taking Nixon’s threat to his reelection seriously. The Atlantic wrote that he “seems to be scrambling to shore up support among the progressive voters who could thwart his renomination.” About a year ago, he signed a bill to prevent New York City from imposing a five-cent fee on plastic bags and called pot a gateway drug; within two months of Nixon’s announcing her candidacy, he “proposed a ban on single-use plastic bags” and released a report endorsing the legalization of recreational marijuana. Nixon’s campaign has dubbed Cuomo’s stroll into left field the “Cynthia Effect.”
Furthermore, Nixon is no conventional opponent; an award-winning actor, she basks in the the media coverage that accompanies celebrity.
As The Spectator postulated, it isn’t difficult to understand why, “in a country so tired of politics that to be a career politician is a positive disadvantage,” celebrities like Nixon make the “perfect candidates” to “reach over the hands of the mainstream media — the fake news, the discredited experts — to appeal directly to the electorate” and entice “voters’ attention in an era of Netflix and YouTube.” In other words, if a “real estate mogul turned reality TV star occupies the White House,” “why shouldn’t Nixon segue from sipping martinis with Carrie and the gang to juggling New York’s $168 billion budget?” Reagan, recalled The New York Times, once clairvoyantly “wondered how anyone could hold office without being an actor.”
Nixon “sees some merit in this” and, comparably, has quipped that Cuomo “deserves an Oscar” for his performance collaborating with Republicans in the State Senate. Despite her absolute lack of government and executive experience, however, she is no utter political neophyte; she has spent the last 17 years advocating for better schools, women’s health and reproductive rights, and LGBTQ equality.
She has served as an organizer and spokesperson for the Alliance for Quality Education, a group that helped to reverse the hundreds of millions in education budget cuts. She had been arrested for protesting at City Hall in 2002. She represented Planned Parenthood in Albany to promote the full Women’s Equality Agenda. In 2009, she lobbied for a marriage equality bill in Albany, and, in 2010, helped found Fight Back New York, “an effort to remove state Senators opposed to same-sex marriage,” which facilitated the election of “three new Senators in support of marriage equality.” Nixon’s efforts earned her GLAAD’s Vito Russo Award, which is given to the openly queer “media professional who has made a significant difference in promoting equal rights” for the LGBTQ community.
Yes, 2018 marks the year of Nixon’s first race, but she made her “First Political Rodeo,” opined The New York Times, in 2013 championing Bill de Blasio’s New York mayoral bid “[b]ack when few others would. When he won the Democratic primary, de Blasio, a rival of Cuomo, referred to Nixon as one of two “architects” of his campaign, for which she “wrangled celebrity endorsements,” arranged benefits, and employed her education activism to back his universal pre-kindergarten initiative. Most assumed that “better-known and better-funded” former City Council speaker Christine Quinn — an openly gay Cuomo surrogate who christened Nixon an “unqualified lesbian” the day after the latter announced her gubernatorial bid — would demolish de Blasio in the Democratic primary. Nixon’s efforts, however, not only helped de Blasio beat Quinn by over 173,000 votes, but gave her “a front-row seat to political combat in New York.” Billy Easton, who is Alliance for Quality Education’s executive director, believes that this race gave Nixon “high-profile, practical experience with the day-to-day political world in New York.”
In a similar vein, the media no longer frames issues as related to ideology or party line; instead, it attributes them to the opinions of individual politicians. One reason, the BPS specified, is that social networking sites “offer new opportunities” for parasocial interactions (PSIs) — the “relationships that the public establishes” with real and fictional characters in the media — between voters and politicians, who can, for example, engage in virtual conversation (for example, by tweeting directly to each other). Twitter and the like lead audience members to feel even more strongly that “they are somehow part of the events portrayed.” Moreover, “[g]etting to know a candidate through their presence in the media” can promote the development of PSIs and “a sense of intimacy.” Grady explored how Ronald Reagan, for example, crafted a star image during his acting career “practically designed for the presidency: all twinkling avuncular eyes and an air of condescending father-knows-best-competence.”
This impression of trust is magnified, the BPS continued, when the politician is not linked to any scandals, over which both mainstream news and tabloids obsess. This phenomenon engenders politicians to enter a “vicious cycle” in which they must quest for “individual (non-scandal-related) coverage” in order to hone their brands, as if products being sold. Forget the single knight on a blue donkey or red elephant; the news has turned politics into a butcher shop where candidates are mangled donkey and elephant carcasses colored by their increasingly scrutinized private lives and affairs.
Actor and advocate Cynthia Nixon, best known for playing lawyer Miranda Hobbes on Sex and the City, declared her candidacy to become the first woman and openly LGBTQ governor of New York on Twitter on March 19. Within 18 minutes, The New York Times reported, the challenger to Democratic two-term incumbent Andrew Cuomo became “the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter in New York, and then nationwide 20 minutes after that.” Nixon, who proclaimed herself a democratic socialist to Politico on July 10, has been marketing herself “as the progressive alternative to the party machine,” described The New York Daily News; she has characterized Cuomo as a sell-out to corporate interests and wealthy donors, to whom he has “given massive tax breaks.” Although actors have nourished the rise of an audience democracy that trivializes party line, this actor has raised the question of whether Cuomo’s heart truly bleeds blue.
Her campaign won’t be receiving any corporate contributions and likes to boast that it raised more small donations in its first 24 hours than Cuomo has during his seven years in office; nevertheless, Cuomo has over $31 million filling his pockets and the legacy of his thrice-elected governor father inextricably sewn onto his sleeve. Nixon’s gubernatorial bid, says The New York Times, is a “huge undertaking.”
It’s no surprise, then, that, at the Democrats’ nominating convention on May 23, Cuomo won 95% of the party members’ votes, prompting Nixon, who failed to meet the 25% delegate threshold, to launch a petition for a spot on the ballot for the September 13 primary. (She filed over 65,000 signatures on July 12 — more than quadruple the 15,000 required.) It’s no surprise, then, that Quinnipiac University found on July 18 that 77% of Democrats said they preferred “experience” over someone “new to politics,” or that Cuomo leads Nixon two-to-one, ahead by 31 points “across every part of the ideological spectrum, every region, every racial group, every age, and among both men and women,” according to Siena College Research Institute’s July 31 survey of likely Democratic primary voters. Yet Nixon’s campaign contested the poll’s veracity, alleging that it didn’t account for progressive women voters who are “consistently outperforming expectations in Democratic primaries.” Fellow democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for instance, defeated 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary for New York’s 14th congressional district this June; Time designated her victory as “the biggest upset of the 2018 elections so far.” And, as Ocasio-Cortez told The Intercept, “You can’t really beat big money with more money.” For progressives to win, she said in an interview with Democracy Now, they must not scurry to the center, but instead expand the electorate by “speaking to those that feel disenchanted, dejected, cynical about our politics, and letting them know that we’re fighting for them.” Nixon, whose rhetoric has depicted Cuomo “as a centrist and Albany insider” and herself as someone running for a “New York for the many, not just the few,” appears to be doing just that.
It also appears that Cuomo is taking notes — and taking Nixon’s threat to his reelection seriously. The Atlantic wrote that he “seems to be scrambling to shore up support among the progressive voters who could thwart his renomination.” About a year ago, he signed a bill to prevent New York City from imposing a five-cent fee on plastic bags and called pot a gateway drug; within two months of Nixon’s announcing her candidacy, he “proposed a ban on single-use plastic bags” and released a report endorsing the legalization of recreational marijuana. Nixon’s campaign has dubbed Cuomo’s stroll into left field the “Cynthia Effect.”
Furthermore, Nixon is no conventional opponent; an award-winning actor, she basks in the the media coverage that accompanies celebrity.
As The Spectator postulated, it isn’t difficult to understand why, “in a country so tired of politics that to be a career politician is a positive disadvantage,” celebrities like Nixon make the “perfect candidates” to “reach over the hands of the mainstream media — the fake news, the discredited experts — to appeal directly to the electorate” and entice “voters’ attention in an era of Netflix and YouTube.” In other words, if a “real estate mogul turned reality TV star occupies the White House,” “why shouldn’t Nixon segue from sipping martinis with Carrie and the gang to juggling New York’s $168 billion budget?” Reagan, recalled The New York Times, once clairvoyantly “wondered how anyone could hold office without being an actor.”
Nixon “sees some merit in this” and, comparably, has quipped that Cuomo “deserves an Oscar” for his performance collaborating with Republicans in the State Senate. Despite her absolute lack of government and executive experience, however, she is no utter political neophyte; she has spent the last 17 years advocating for better schools, women’s health and reproductive rights, and LGBTQ equality.
She has served as an organizer and spokesperson for the Alliance for Quality Education, a group that helped to reverse the hundreds of millions in education budget cuts. She had been arrested for protesting at City Hall in 2002. She represented Planned Parenthood in Albany to promote the full Women’s Equality Agenda. In 2009, she lobbied for a marriage equality bill in Albany, and, in 2010, helped found Fight Back New York, “an effort to remove state Senators opposed to same-sex marriage,” which facilitated the election of “three new Senators in support of marriage equality.” Nixon’s efforts earned her GLAAD’s Vito Russo Award, which is given to the openly queer “media professional who has made a significant difference in promoting equal rights” for the LGBTQ community.
Yes, 2018 marks the year of Nixon’s first race, but she made her “First Political Rodeo,” opined The New York Times, in 2013 championing Bill de Blasio’s New York mayoral bid “[b]ack when few others would. When he won the Democratic primary, de Blasio, a rival of Cuomo, referred to Nixon as one of two “architects” of his campaign, for which she “wrangled celebrity endorsements,” arranged benefits, and employed her education activism to back his universal pre-kindergarten initiative. Most assumed that “better-known and better-funded” former City Council speaker Christine Quinn — an openly gay Cuomo surrogate who christened Nixon an “unqualified lesbian” the day after the latter announced her gubernatorial bid — would demolish de Blasio in the Democratic primary. Nixon’s efforts, however, not only helped de Blasio beat Quinn by over 173,000 votes, but gave her “a front-row seat to political combat in New York.” Billy Easton, who is Alliance for Quality Education’s executive director, believes that this race gave Nixon “high-profile, practical experience with the day-to-day political world in New York.”
Five years later, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, when anti-Trump sentiment is expected to fuel “big turnout from angry Democrats” in the fall and the #MeToo movement has left “a fired-up, female Democratic electorate” in its wake, it could be a “good moment,” portrayed The New York Times, for a well-known and long-time progressive advocate like Nixon to run for office.
Indeed, her triumph, as another New York Times article surmised, may feel more tenable in the Trump era; “if a reality television star can be president, why can’t a worldly and accomplished actor” — especially one who has, for the most part, come across as “policy-fluent” and a “quick study” (though, not unlike “many sitting officeholders,” sometimes vague if asked “for a second or third beat on a subject”) — “run a state?”
Acknowledging that “the nation’s government-by-celebrity experiment” is a disaster, Nixon expressed that there’s nothing “inherently wrong with celebrity in politics because it gives you a platform.”
“It’s what you choose to do with that platform,” she added. “Do you choose to give yourself and other 1 percenters a massive tax break that they don’t need? Or do you choose to advocate for important things that need your voice, like LGBTQ equality or women’s health or women’s rights?”
Beforehand in the same interview, she rejected the comparison many have struck between her and the President — the man, who, coincidentally, presented her in 2004 with her first Emmy award for playing Miranda during his first season as host of The Apprentice. The Week labeled her (not Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders) “the left-wing version” of Trump’s “right-wing populism” and as the “future of the Democratic Party.” Although both have sought to paint themselves as anti-establishment outsiders, she posited that the Commander-in-Chief is a real estate developer who “inherited his money and his company from his father.”
“That could not be more different from me,” she said before launching into a narrative she seems to invoke at the drop of a hat. “I grew up here in a one-bedroom five-flight walk-up with a single mom, I went to public school, I started acting when I was 12 in order to pay for college because my family couldn’t afford to.”
Vogue echoed Nixon’s opposition to being likened to Trump and argued that “Cynthia Nixon Is Not Just Another Trumpian Celebrity Running for Office.” The article’s author, Michelle Ruiz, a contributing editor, conceded that Trump’s presidency has affirmed that “hosting The Apprentice and previously owning the Miss Universe Pageant definitely doesn’t bode well for governmental success (and can lead to hazards such as getting into nuclear pissing contests with Kim Jong-un on Twitter)” and that “there’s a certainly a valid argument to be made that Americans should never, ever so much as consider a Hollywood candidate again.” Ruiz, however, called attention to the fact that, in addition to the current President, there have been a “veritable parade of male celebrities who have crossed over into politics,” including Ronald Reagan, Al Franken, and Arnold Schwarzenegger (who, like Cuomo, was, for a time, married into the Kennedy family).
Indeed, her triumph, as another New York Times article surmised, may feel more tenable in the Trump era; “if a reality television star can be president, why can’t a worldly and accomplished actor” — especially one who has, for the most part, come across as “policy-fluent” and a “quick study” (though, not unlike “many sitting officeholders,” sometimes vague if asked “for a second or third beat on a subject”) — “run a state?”
Acknowledging that “the nation’s government-by-celebrity experiment” is a disaster, Nixon expressed that there’s nothing “inherently wrong with celebrity in politics because it gives you a platform.”
“It’s what you choose to do with that platform,” she added. “Do you choose to give yourself and other 1 percenters a massive tax break that they don’t need? Or do you choose to advocate for important things that need your voice, like LGBTQ equality or women’s health or women’s rights?”
Beforehand in the same interview, she rejected the comparison many have struck between her and the President — the man, who, coincidentally, presented her in 2004 with her first Emmy award for playing Miranda during his first season as host of The Apprentice. The Week labeled her (not Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders) “the left-wing version” of Trump’s “right-wing populism” and as the “future of the Democratic Party.” Although both have sought to paint themselves as anti-establishment outsiders, she posited that the Commander-in-Chief is a real estate developer who “inherited his money and his company from his father.”
“That could not be more different from me,” she said before launching into a narrative she seems to invoke at the drop of a hat. “I grew up here in a one-bedroom five-flight walk-up with a single mom, I went to public school, I started acting when I was 12 in order to pay for college because my family couldn’t afford to.”
Vogue echoed Nixon’s opposition to being likened to Trump and argued that “Cynthia Nixon Is Not Just Another Trumpian Celebrity Running for Office.” The article’s author, Michelle Ruiz, a contributing editor, conceded that Trump’s presidency has affirmed that “hosting The Apprentice and previously owning the Miss Universe Pageant definitely doesn’t bode well for governmental success (and can lead to hazards such as getting into nuclear pissing contests with Kim Jong-un on Twitter)” and that “there’s a certainly a valid argument to be made that Americans should never, ever so much as consider a Hollywood candidate again.” Ruiz, however, called attention to the fact that, in addition to the current President, there have been a “veritable parade of male celebrities who have crossed over into politics,” including Ronald Reagan, Al Franken, and Arnold Schwarzenegger (who, like Cuomo, was, for a time, married into the Kennedy family).
Grady suggested that “the fantasy roles we offer men transition easily from one sphere of power to another,” while women are limited to acting out soft power fantasies that don’t translate well to executive offices. Ruiz considered how it’s more than acceptable “for male celebrities to run for office” and asserted that, when women do it, they are “instantly dismissed as unqualified overreachers.”
For Trump, after the launch of his presidential campaign, “[h]is lack of experience was characterized as a burden he’d have to ‘shake off’—but not necessarily a barrier to entry,” wrote Grady, alluding to a CNN article from June 2015.
“Women are promoted based on performance, but men are promoted based on potential,” Ruiz quoted from a different journalist’s article for The Times. Given that elections often “rely heavily on campaign promises,” this trend fosters a “deeply unequal playing field” that favors men, who are judged on their alleged capacity. Disparately, women are “penalized for what they have or haven’t already done.”
Shane Goldmacher, the chief political correspondent of the Metro Desk at The New York Times, also explored how female celebrities who have run for public office have historically been treated differently from their male counterparts. Although both genders face “the question of qualifications,” as Nixon herself discerned: “Not just in politics but in most industries, women have to prove themselves five times over to be thought of as qualified.” (In another New York Times article, she suspected that if she “were a man with exactly the same résumé,” her qualifications would not be nearly as disputed to the degree that they are.)
This finding has been corroborated by academics like Debbie Walsh, Director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, and sheds light on why, despite the electoral wins of numerous men in the public eye like Sonny Bono, Fred Thompson, and Jesse Ventura, Nixon “would be one of the first female celebrities elected to a prominent political office anywhere in the United States.” Why the much fewer number of female stars that have “sought public office in recent decades,” such as Shirley Temple Black for Congress in 1967, have lost.
“I think women ourselves feel like unless we have a Nobel Prize, written a best seller and labored in the industry for 20 years then we’re not qualified to put our hat in the ring,” Nixon said. Despite having been “first approached to run for governor back in 2010,” her internalized notion of female inadequacy prevented her from running until now.
“We would have had a woman governor by now if the traditional paths allowed for a woman,” Jess McIntosh, a Democratic strategist who has worked to elect Democratic candidates, said of New York.
When mobilizing candidates on less typical paths, “celebrity is a logical choice,” McIntosh believes, because it furnishes those who possess it with two scarce and highly-desired characteristics: “name identification and a potential fund-raising base.” (Think Trump. Opinion contributor Lauren Wright at The Hill noted, however, that it’s been eight years since “Nixon’s last big role.” When she launched her gubernatorial campaign, her name recognition rate among Democrats was 40 percent — no better than Cuomo’s. By contrast, when Trump launched his presidential campaign, just as his time on The Celebrity Apprentice was coming to an end, “92 percent of Republicans knew who he was.”)
Nixon’s “capacity for empathy in performances” could even be “transferable to effective government,” actor and playwright Wallace Shawn conjectured.
“Good actors know how to put themselves in other people’s shoes,” he said to The New York Times, “to imagine what it’s like to be somebody not yourself.”
Inversely, many people are having trouble imagining Nixon in shoes other than Miranda’s $800 ones. And Nixon may be somewhat responsible. In her political persona, she has endeavored to both cultivate and cast away qualities associated with the role that brought her fame; this dueling duality is best epitomized by two pieces of merchandise in the campaign store: a tee that reads “I’m a Miranda and I’m voting for Cynthia” and a hat that reads "I'm a Governor," the word "Miranda" having been crossed out. Her attempts to have her cake and eat it too have no doubt influenced the public’s perception of her political qualifications for better and for worse; to answer Grady’s question whether “Nixon’s time on Sex and the City a liability or an asset,” it’s both.
For Trump, after the launch of his presidential campaign, “[h]is lack of experience was characterized as a burden he’d have to ‘shake off’—but not necessarily a barrier to entry,” wrote Grady, alluding to a CNN article from June 2015.
“Women are promoted based on performance, but men are promoted based on potential,” Ruiz quoted from a different journalist’s article for The Times. Given that elections often “rely heavily on campaign promises,” this trend fosters a “deeply unequal playing field” that favors men, who are judged on their alleged capacity. Disparately, women are “penalized for what they have or haven’t already done.”
Shane Goldmacher, the chief political correspondent of the Metro Desk at The New York Times, also explored how female celebrities who have run for public office have historically been treated differently from their male counterparts. Although both genders face “the question of qualifications,” as Nixon herself discerned: “Not just in politics but in most industries, women have to prove themselves five times over to be thought of as qualified.” (In another New York Times article, she suspected that if she “were a man with exactly the same résumé,” her qualifications would not be nearly as disputed to the degree that they are.)
This finding has been corroborated by academics like Debbie Walsh, Director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, and sheds light on why, despite the electoral wins of numerous men in the public eye like Sonny Bono, Fred Thompson, and Jesse Ventura, Nixon “would be one of the first female celebrities elected to a prominent political office anywhere in the United States.” Why the much fewer number of female stars that have “sought public office in recent decades,” such as Shirley Temple Black for Congress in 1967, have lost.
“I think women ourselves feel like unless we have a Nobel Prize, written a best seller and labored in the industry for 20 years then we’re not qualified to put our hat in the ring,” Nixon said. Despite having been “first approached to run for governor back in 2010,” her internalized notion of female inadequacy prevented her from running until now.
“We would have had a woman governor by now if the traditional paths allowed for a woman,” Jess McIntosh, a Democratic strategist who has worked to elect Democratic candidates, said of New York.
When mobilizing candidates on less typical paths, “celebrity is a logical choice,” McIntosh believes, because it furnishes those who possess it with two scarce and highly-desired characteristics: “name identification and a potential fund-raising base.” (Think Trump. Opinion contributor Lauren Wright at The Hill noted, however, that it’s been eight years since “Nixon’s last big role.” When she launched her gubernatorial campaign, her name recognition rate among Democrats was 40 percent — no better than Cuomo’s. By contrast, when Trump launched his presidential campaign, just as his time on The Celebrity Apprentice was coming to an end, “92 percent of Republicans knew who he was.”)
Nixon’s “capacity for empathy in performances” could even be “transferable to effective government,” actor and playwright Wallace Shawn conjectured.
“Good actors know how to put themselves in other people’s shoes,” he said to The New York Times, “to imagine what it’s like to be somebody not yourself.”
Inversely, many people are having trouble imagining Nixon in shoes other than Miranda’s $800 ones. And Nixon may be somewhat responsible. In her political persona, she has endeavored to both cultivate and cast away qualities associated with the role that brought her fame; this dueling duality is best epitomized by two pieces of merchandise in the campaign store: a tee that reads “I’m a Miranda and I’m voting for Cynthia” and a hat that reads "I'm a Governor," the word "Miranda" having been crossed out. Her attempts to have her cake and eat it too have no doubt influenced the public’s perception of her political qualifications for better and for worse; to answer Grady’s question whether “Nixon’s time on Sex and the City a liability or an asset,” it’s both.
In June, Nixon penned a Refinery29 article in which she addressed how she — who had always anticipated the importance of motherhood in her life — and the “decidedly un-glamorous” “fearless gladiator” Miranda had, though first dissimilar, “grown toward each other over the course of six seasons.” Nixon claimed Miranda inspired her to be bold as she first forayed into political activism; simultaneously, Miranda “softened” into a caring mother, never trying, though, “to squeeze herself into notions of womanhood and femininity.” Instead, according to Nixon, she bravely defined them “on her own terms.”
“Twenty years after Sex and the City first aired, I’m proud to see that many of the values that Miranda embodied have spread and are more part of our discourse than ever,” she wrote. “In this moment, women all over America are rising up — saying #MeToo and #TimesUp for sexual harassment, organizing marches, running for office in historic numbers, and fighting against sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and other forms of oppression.”
Similarly, Jennifer Wright at The New York Post thinks that “the take-no-nonsense badass Miranda is the right symbol at the right time.”
“New Yorkers are hoping Cynthia Nixon is exactly like Miranda,” she titled her article.
Nixon, nevertheless, clarified that Miranda is “not the perfect feminist role model.” For the feminism to succeed, she reminds us, it “must be intersectional,” with “women of color” (as well as trans women) “leading the way.” In Nixon’s own words, Sex and the City embodies “a very affluent, white slice of our diverse city and state” that encapsulates the shortcomings of “our real-life feminist movement.”
But we must recognize that despite Nixon’s admirable longing for racial justice and equality across the board, her own campaign falls victim to the same pitfalls she pinpoints in Miranda.
Cuomo’s exceptionally strong margin over Nixon among black voters (74 percent to 17 percent, in an earlier Siena poll), according to CNN Senior Writer and Analyst Harry Enten, reflects “the continually poor showing by progressive insurgents among black voters” that Ocasio-Cortez experienced in June and that may have cost Sanders the 2016 Democratic nomination for President of the United States. Although black Democrats are likelier than other Democrats, especially white ones, to consider themselves moderate or conservative, Nixon should still do more for communities of color than endorse the legalization of cannabis.
She told Forbes that African Americans, who have been targeted unfairly by by the War on Drugs, should be given the first opportunities to open legal marijuana businesses. She called this “a form of reparations.” CityLab staff writer Brentin Mock recounted how Jamelle Bouie, the chief political correspondent for Slate.com, has also used “‘reparations’ to describe race-focused cannabis legalization reforms,” and how former National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) director Ben Jealous and several other black racial justice advocates have “made essentially the same point.” Many prominent black individuals, however, objected to Nixon’s recommendation, which they found to be “racially insensitive” and a misappropriation of the term “reparations.” Manhattan Democratic Party Chairman Keith Wright said that “[i]t is insulting to my soul, that the free labor that my ancestors gave to this country would be equated with the selling of marijuana.”
Legal scholar James Forman Jr. doesn’t think that Nixon meant “reparations for slavery” and suggested that the controversy’s underlying problem is the history of “white America allowing drugs and vice to flourish in black communities... in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.” As a result, African Americans might be wary of her proposed “form of black liberation.”
“Twenty years after Sex and the City first aired, I’m proud to see that many of the values that Miranda embodied have spread and are more part of our discourse than ever,” she wrote. “In this moment, women all over America are rising up — saying #MeToo and #TimesUp for sexual harassment, organizing marches, running for office in historic numbers, and fighting against sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and other forms of oppression.”
Similarly, Jennifer Wright at The New York Post thinks that “the take-no-nonsense badass Miranda is the right symbol at the right time.”
“New Yorkers are hoping Cynthia Nixon is exactly like Miranda,” she titled her article.
Nixon, nevertheless, clarified that Miranda is “not the perfect feminist role model.” For the feminism to succeed, she reminds us, it “must be intersectional,” with “women of color” (as well as trans women) “leading the way.” In Nixon’s own words, Sex and the City embodies “a very affluent, white slice of our diverse city and state” that encapsulates the shortcomings of “our real-life feminist movement.”
But we must recognize that despite Nixon’s admirable longing for racial justice and equality across the board, her own campaign falls victim to the same pitfalls she pinpoints in Miranda.
Cuomo’s exceptionally strong margin over Nixon among black voters (74 percent to 17 percent, in an earlier Siena poll), according to CNN Senior Writer and Analyst Harry Enten, reflects “the continually poor showing by progressive insurgents among black voters” that Ocasio-Cortez experienced in June and that may have cost Sanders the 2016 Democratic nomination for President of the United States. Although black Democrats are likelier than other Democrats, especially white ones, to consider themselves moderate or conservative, Nixon should still do more for communities of color than endorse the legalization of cannabis.
She told Forbes that African Americans, who have been targeted unfairly by by the War on Drugs, should be given the first opportunities to open legal marijuana businesses. She called this “a form of reparations.” CityLab staff writer Brentin Mock recounted how Jamelle Bouie, the chief political correspondent for Slate.com, has also used “‘reparations’ to describe race-focused cannabis legalization reforms,” and how former National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) director Ben Jealous and several other black racial justice advocates have “made essentially the same point.” Many prominent black individuals, however, objected to Nixon’s recommendation, which they found to be “racially insensitive” and a misappropriation of the term “reparations.” Manhattan Democratic Party Chairman Keith Wright said that “[i]t is insulting to my soul, that the free labor that my ancestors gave to this country would be equated with the selling of marijuana.”
Legal scholar James Forman Jr. doesn’t think that Nixon meant “reparations for slavery” and suggested that the controversy’s underlying problem is the history of “white America allowing drugs and vice to flourish in black communities... in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.” As a result, African Americans might be wary of her proposed “form of black liberation.”
Furthermore, Vox staff writer P.R. Lockhart wrote that “access to the marijuana industry,” though helpful, would not suffice to rectify “centuries of injustices against blacks in America, starting with slavery, followed by decades of lynching, Jim Crow, redlining, employment discrimination, and other barriers.”
Nixon’s platform should encompass more than, as the Black Lives Matter of Greater New York put it, an appeal to “harmful stereotypes of African-Americans as drug users and dealers.”
This departure from Miranda Hobbes would be in her power, but she might have less control elsewhere. Although Nixon insisted to The Associated Press that she is “so much more than an actor,” freelance writer Jen Chaney averred in an article for Vulture that “her campaign announcement video, intentionally or not, capitalized” on the very part that made her famous.
Nixon marches through Manhattan wearing high heels, “the same way Miranda used to do during her walk-and-talks with Carrie Bradshaw,” and gazes “directly into camera with a confident, knowing smile” akin to the one of Miranda’s tell-tale expressions.
Chaney admits that “Miranda probably wouldn’t have taken the train to Albany” as Nixon does in the video, but suggests that this deviation indicates that, although “Candidate Nixon is reminiscent of Miranda,” she is “also her own, more politically engaged person.” This distinction is a slippery slope and one that Trump didn’t face. Reality television, unlike scripted television, Wright distinguishes, “gives viewers the impression that they really understand someone.” (One Gotham Gazette commenter juxtaposed Trump and Nixon as someone who “ran a multi-billion dollar company” and someone who “made a living pretending to be someone else,” respectively) The rest of the footage features her “doing typical New Yorker things: dropping off her daughter at school, walking through the streets with a cup of coffee, taking the subway,” yet the Nixon campaign links these everyday activities to what New York Times writer Ginia Bellafante calls “the image of the city as a luxury brand — an elite, fantastical consumer paradise.”
“And so despite Nixon’s ostensibly populist politics, the article concluded,” Grady wrote of Bellafante’s piece, “her association with frothy, silly Sex and the City might mean that she is not ‘the best vessel for her own invaluable message.’”
Nixon, who The New York Times fancied is “surely the only candidate in history who said she had no trouble performing nude on television because she had already breast-fed on the No. 2 train,” has done her best to project “urban authenticity” while haunted by “the specter of Miranda.”
Yet even if she cannot escape “the baggage of [her] most iconic role,” her campaign, who, in an email, repeatedly misspelled popular upstate city Ithaca as “Ithica,” would likely benefit from acknowledging that Nixon is running for Governor not of the City of New York, but the State.
“In recent Democratic primaries, rural parts of New York state... have been the most likely to embrace left-leaning insurgent candidates such as Zephyr Teachout in the 2014 gubernatorial race and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in his unsuccessful bid to win the Democratic nomination in the 2016 presidential race,” chronicled a June article for City & State, but, the way things are going, that pattern will probably not reemerge in the Democratic primary for the 2018 New York gubernatorial election. Cuomo’s lead over Nixon upstate, according to Siena polls, nearly tripled from June 13 to July 31 — from eight percent to 21 percent. Nixon seeks to humanize herself by making it a point that she rides the subway everyday, but she may be alienating upstate voters who aren’t served by #CUOMOSMTA, which The New York Times has made a “central campaign issue” in this horse race. Notwithstanding the
Nixon campaign’s claim that the latter poll excluded predictably unpredictable progressive women voters, of course, it might be time for her to burst the Sex and the City bubble and venture upstate.
Nixon’s platform should encompass more than, as the Black Lives Matter of Greater New York put it, an appeal to “harmful stereotypes of African-Americans as drug users and dealers.”
This departure from Miranda Hobbes would be in her power, but she might have less control elsewhere. Although Nixon insisted to The Associated Press that she is “so much more than an actor,” freelance writer Jen Chaney averred in an article for Vulture that “her campaign announcement video, intentionally or not, capitalized” on the very part that made her famous.
Nixon marches through Manhattan wearing high heels, “the same way Miranda used to do during her walk-and-talks with Carrie Bradshaw,” and gazes “directly into camera with a confident, knowing smile” akin to the one of Miranda’s tell-tale expressions.
Chaney admits that “Miranda probably wouldn’t have taken the train to Albany” as Nixon does in the video, but suggests that this deviation indicates that, although “Candidate Nixon is reminiscent of Miranda,” she is “also her own, more politically engaged person.” This distinction is a slippery slope and one that Trump didn’t face. Reality television, unlike scripted television, Wright distinguishes, “gives viewers the impression that they really understand someone.” (One Gotham Gazette commenter juxtaposed Trump and Nixon as someone who “ran a multi-billion dollar company” and someone who “made a living pretending to be someone else,” respectively) The rest of the footage features her “doing typical New Yorker things: dropping off her daughter at school, walking through the streets with a cup of coffee, taking the subway,” yet the Nixon campaign links these everyday activities to what New York Times writer Ginia Bellafante calls “the image of the city as a luxury brand — an elite, fantastical consumer paradise.”
“And so despite Nixon’s ostensibly populist politics, the article concluded,” Grady wrote of Bellafante’s piece, “her association with frothy, silly Sex and the City might mean that she is not ‘the best vessel for her own invaluable message.’”
Nixon, who The New York Times fancied is “surely the only candidate in history who said she had no trouble performing nude on television because she had already breast-fed on the No. 2 train,” has done her best to project “urban authenticity” while haunted by “the specter of Miranda.”
Yet even if she cannot escape “the baggage of [her] most iconic role,” her campaign, who, in an email, repeatedly misspelled popular upstate city Ithaca as “Ithica,” would likely benefit from acknowledging that Nixon is running for Governor not of the City of New York, but the State.
“In recent Democratic primaries, rural parts of New York state... have been the most likely to embrace left-leaning insurgent candidates such as Zephyr Teachout in the 2014 gubernatorial race and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in his unsuccessful bid to win the Democratic nomination in the 2016 presidential race,” chronicled a June article for City & State, but, the way things are going, that pattern will probably not reemerge in the Democratic primary for the 2018 New York gubernatorial election. Cuomo’s lead over Nixon upstate, according to Siena polls, nearly tripled from June 13 to July 31 — from eight percent to 21 percent. Nixon seeks to humanize herself by making it a point that she rides the subway everyday, but she may be alienating upstate voters who aren’t served by #CUOMOSMTA, which The New York Times has made a “central campaign issue” in this horse race. Notwithstanding the
Nixon campaign’s claim that the latter poll excluded predictably unpredictable progressive women voters, of course, it might be time for her to burst the Sex and the City bubble and venture upstate.
