The XX Factor

Kathleen Rice and the Cultural Elite

Kathleen Rice , who’s facing off against Eric Schneiderman in tomorrow’s Democratic primary for New York state attorney general, has grabbed a couple of unexpected endorsements in the last couple of days. Mad Men ’s John Slattery, who went to college with Rice, filmed a video endorsement of her candidacy , and ads featuring him have been cluttering the RSS feeds of some of the New York-based blogs I read over the past couple of days. Slattery’s most memorable political moment previously was playing a candidate with a urine fetish on Sex and the City . Then today, Bravo honcho Andy Cohen tweeted an endorsement of Rice , accidentally saying she’ll be a great “Attorney Governor,” underlining precisely how far he is from being a political insider. Bravo explicitly markets itself to the same “urban elite” audience from which Mad Men draws. I’m unsure why exactly tough-girl Rice has struck a nerve with that particular segment of cultural creators-maybe that Law & Order -esque ad of hers was a dog whistle of some kind. ( L&O , after all, is the ” secret vice of power women .”) Schneiderman, for his part, has been endorsed by more traditional arbiters of liberal politics, The Nation and the New York Times . So it’s a stand-off: old-school cultural elitists versus new-school cultural elitists wrestling over who can best attack the entrenched corruption in Albany. Me, I’m waiting to see how the cast of the Wire weighs in.