Lady Business: Celebrity and the City and Running While Female

Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the twenty-fifth issue, published April 19, 2018.

 

Star-Power Politics

At the beginning of this week, on a stormy Monday morning, I had a more-miserable-than-usual commute. The trains were so crowded I let four pass before finally finding space to board one, which then stopped at several stations that had developed underground waterfalls. 

Which gave me the perfect setting (and plenty of time!) to read this New York Magazine profile of Cynthia Nixon, the Sex and the City actor running in the Democratic primary against sitting governor (and buck-passer of subway reform) Andrew Cuomo:

For years, people in the liberal-activist circles that Nixon and her wife, Christine Marinoni, travel in had chafed at the governor’s arrogance, his backroom wheeling and dealing, and especially the concessions he has made to Republicans. He has allowed them to redraw their own districts and enabled the Independent Democratic Conference, a bizarre splinter group of senators who were elected as Democrats but chose instead to vote as Republicans, thus often watering down progressive legislation. The governor “presents himself as a progressive champion, but really nothing could be farther from the truth,” Nixon told me, credibly delivering the line as though she were saying it for the first time.

As the profile points out, Nixon’s candidacy has already forced Cuomo to start fixing things that progressives have complained about for years, like finally trying to end the IDC and, yesterday, allowing parolees to vote. (No word on subway funding yet, but a privileged city girl can dream!)

Now Nixon, and some political analysts cited by the profile, are starting to think she might actually win. Cue pearl-clutching: Another celebrity trying to govern?

Looming over Nixon’s candidacy is this question, which even a sympathetic voter might entertain: Can Cynthia Nixon actually run the government of New York State? She has built a career demonstrating her ability to move crowds, to connect with people, and to agitate for causes. Would she actually know how to control other politicians and wield power? And is it worth dethroning a dynasty of the Democratic Party to find out?

I’m inclined to like Nixon as a personality: I’m a Miranda, after all, and I was deeply impressed by her acting in Rabbit Hole. I appreciate her history of activism for unglamorous local issues, including public-school funding. Then there are her ties to Mayor Bill de Blasio, and his long-running feud with Cuomo. However deeply immature I may find that feud, and both men for letting it get in the way of their governing, there’s a temptation to be Machiavellian about the primaries: Since de Blasio was just re-elected through 2021, wouldn’t New Yorkers--meaning city residents–-benefit from having a governor who actually gets along with the mayor?

The question of celebrities infecting politics also feels largely like a lost battle. See the obvious example, but it’s not like Trump alone opened the floodgates for Oprah and the Rock to waltz into the White House someday. (Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse Ventura aren’t exactly poster-children for effective governance, but they at least make Nixon seem reasonable and qualified by comparison!)

Contemplating Oprah running for office, or Miranda from Sex and the City, also gets around one of the nastiest traps for experienced women politicians: The likability gap, and how much people hate voting for women who are seen as too ambitious, too familiar, and too political. Many women develop those reputations when they’ve spent years and decades in politics, doing the work that gives them the experience to be seen as super-qualified. And as we all discovered in 2016, qualifications don’t matter to many voters; what we think we know about the candidates, or how we feel about them, does.

We already think we know Oprah, whose entire brand is being likable. Ditto the Rock; ditto, for the much smaller circles of “wealthy New York Broadway viewers and local Xennial women,” Cynthia Nixon. We don’t have to know who she is because we think we already do, and she doesn’t have to waste time telling us (in a “genuine” way that translates to millions of voters at once).

We already think we like her. Given that powerful advantage, why wouldn’t she run?
 

Lady Bits  

--The saga of Southwest Flight 1380 is terrifying and tragic and is making me rethink my traditional love of window seats. The captain who guided the plane to the ground almost didn’t become a pilot; she couldn’t get into the Air Force, because she was a woman, and had to wait a year for the Navy to even look at her application. Then she became one of the first women to fly the F/A-18 Hornet.
 
 --Related, I’ve been wanting light and happy things of late! (A new Handmaid’s Tale onslaught approaches.) So I’ve been watching a lot of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and appreciating how consistently the show manages to be casually feminist and “awake” within its bro-y shell:

Thank you for reading, commenting, and subscribing to this newsletter! Please tell your friends to sign up here, let me know what you think about this week's issue, and what else you'd like to see me write about: maria.aspan@gmail.com