“He was mayor of New York City on 9/11? You don’t say.”Photo: AP
We’re not huge fans of the trope that follows Elizabeth Kucinich around. (You know: “Dennis doesn’t need poll numbers — he already won”). It’s flippant and ever-so-slightly swinish. That said, yesterday Mrs. Kucinich spoke at the same breast-cancer summit as Judith Giuliani, and you know what? Screw it: Dennis already won. Elizabeth (a) showed up in a stylish pink coat hinting at, but not aping, the breast-cancer ribbon color, (b) spoke knowledgeably and off-the-cuff about the British health-care system, and (c) stuck around to chat.
By contrast, Giuliani, who was supposed to be the star of the evening — she has a cancer survivor for a husband, after all — read in a nervous monotone from a cheat sheet, treated the public to a terrible “Positive is good, right?” anecdote, and left before Kucinich even spoke. But not, thankfully, before providing us with a wealth of awkward photo ops of the two women “conversing”! The Times hedges in its postmortem; the Daily News hands the night to Kucinich outright. The funniest thing about the matchup, to us, is that when Judith looks in the mirror each morning, she probably sees someone like Elizabeth: a worldly, sophisticated beauty, an intriguingly but not inappropriately younger wife, a leader’s confidante. Good Lord, a Giuliani-Kucinich power couple would be unstoppable. As it is — and it’s exploding our p.c. brains even as we’re typing this — the matter of Hillary’s presidency may yet be decided by Giuliani’s taste in third wives. —Michael Idov
Mrs. Giuliani, in Rare Solo Appearance, Campaigns Again [NYT]
Judith Giuliani Adopts a Low Profile in New Hampshire [NYDN]
