Why the heck should Kentucky care about the NYC mayoral race?

Mary Potter


Why the heck should Kentucky care about the NYC mayoral race? | New York, Kentucky, scandal,

 

(Clinton, KY - August 2, 2013) - By now the weiner/Weiner jokes on late night television have migrated throughout our television sets, internet feeds and radio broadcasts. The story of now how New York mayoral candidate Andrew Weiner fell from front runner to back of the pack because of some very weird and kinky Twitter posts (complete with photos of his nether regions and a screen name "Carlos Danger")

Maybe it's because reporters like saying his name. Like children who have learned a forbidden potty word, they compete to see how many times they can work his name into a sentence. The shock value is too yummy to resist.

Maybe it's because of his wife, Huma Abedin, often called "elegant" and her visible pain at standing by her man. It doesn't hurt that Huma is also closely connected with the putative front runner for the Democratic nomination for president in 2016 - Hilary Clinton. Reporters get to dredge into the former First Lady/Senator from New York/ Secretary of State's own experience with husbandly misconduct.

And maybe it's because it's so darned convenient. Step out of the office. Run down the street to a press conference. Take a train or taxi to a campaign stop and still get home for supper.

So why should a sleazy scandal in a city hundreds of miles away matter to Kentuckians? Because what happens in the City of New York affects the nation as a whole.

New York is the center of business (Wall Street), advertising (Madison Avenue), publishing, international relations (the UN), tragedy - the Twin Towers, communication, entertainment (Broadway), art and news (the New York Times, CBS, NBC, Fox, Comedy Central and others).  It is bigger than Hollywood, more influential than Beijing.

Because it is a city with almost twice as many residents as the whole state of Kentucky. NYC in 2011 - 8.245 million. Kentucky in 2011- 4.3 million. Their taste, their wishes, their buying power affects what we eat, drink and wear in the future.

Because New York's mayors matter to the federal government - from LaGuardia to Guiliana - to Bloomberg, when New York mayors speak, Washington listens.

And because if New Yorkers, those lovable curmudgeons, fall for Weiner's foolishness and elect him mayor, we Kentuckians will feel their pain.  We will have to explain to our young men and women why sexting with strange women is a bad thing - even though its poster boy got Gracie Mansion as his reward for bad behaviour.

New York matters to Kentuckians - even those of us who have never laid eyes on it and never will.