New York Observer owner Jared Kushner may have enjoyed this schmooze with Marisa Tomei and Lili Taylor last month, but one skirt he's definitely not chasing is that of GOP state attorney general candidate Jeanine Pirro. Kushner's presence on a "host committee" for a Pirro breakfast isn't really a level of intimacy he's, y'know, comfortable with right now:
"Next" you say? New York Observer owner Jared Kushner's record of federal campaign donations have been all straight-line Democratic — senators Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer, even the defenestrated Joe Lieberman. So what's he doing on the hosting committee for a shakedown breakfast in honor of Jeanine Pirro, doomed Republican candidate for attorney general? She's 17 points down in the polls to Andrew Cuomo, and has the faithful support of basically no one, including her own party. Seems doubtful that Kushner would bother to plant pro-Pirro bias at the Observer, though the paper certainly doesn't mind sticking it to Cuomo. (In the Observer's defense, Cuomo is usually more than capable of sticking it to himself.) Perhaps Kushner admires Pirro's courageous stand against pedophiles. One can only help that Kushner is just doing Pirro or someone in her campaign a solid by throwing a little pity-cash her way.
It's apparently Pedophile Day in state politics: The News' Ben Smith notes a controversy concerning the image above, used in a flier by failed Attorney General candidate Sean Patrick Maloney. Gay City News claims that the image perpetuates a stereotype of gay men preying on young boys. Smith finds the concern "overwrought," wondering how we even know the predator in the picture is supposed to be gay. (It's the hair, Ben.)
We've always imagined that the hardest part of being a political flack — or any sort of flack, really — is having to pretend to believe in someone and his cause just because he's the guy signing your paychecks.
News comes today that Jeanine Pirro, the Westchester Country district attorney, will run against Hillary Clinton for U.S. Senate. They're both hard-charging, well-known, charismatic women. And they both have husbands who've been in the public eye. "Ms. Pirro's advisers also believe that in a Senate race," observes the Times, "the candidates' husband issues could cancel each other out."
