We’ve got so much time for
WE GET IT. With Trump in the White House and Oprah basically becoming the de facto US President for a week after she gave one good speech, is now really the time for yet another celebrity to enter American politics?
Well, yes. Last week, Cynthia Nixon (aka Miranda from Sex And The City) launched her bid to become the next Democratic governor of New York state.
But what makes her qualified, we hear you groan. True, she’s never run for elected office. But she does have a serious record of campaigning behind her. She’s passionate about female reproductive rights ( in 2016, she wrote an essay for Time entitled ‘Abortion rights are human rights’), she’s been an education activist since the early 2000s, she is a staunch feminist (she brought her kids along to the 2018 Women’s March in January) and is appropriately anti-trump. Plus, she would be New York’s first female and bisexual governor (she campaigned for marriage equality and is married to fellow LGBTQ rights activist Christine Marinoni).
If she wins, she has promised to tackle New York’s ‘crumbling’ subway system, the wealth gap across the state (the biggest in the US), inequity and children living in poverty.
Of course, there was a backlash. Particularly from former New York mayoral candidate Christine Quinn, who described her as an ‘unqualified lesbian’. Cynthia’s response? ‘It’s true that I never received my certificate from the Department of Lesbian affairs, though in my defence there’s a lot of paperwork required.’
Now there’s a Nixon we can get behind.