The actress, the governor and performance politics

Reflecting the surrounding demographics, the audience was made up almost entirely of African-Americans, a population she argued the current governor, Andrew M. Cuomo, has disregarded, with too little investment in public schools, too little effort made at eradicating inequality, too much capitulation to big-moneyed interests and venal and corrupt state legislators.

Nixon laid out her biography: the child of a single mother with whom she had lived in a fifth-floor walk-up, a graduate of New York City public schools who sends her own children to them, a young woman who paid for her college education herself. The unspoken assertion was both obvious and deft — that while she may be an actress she is, in fact, the real thing; it is her opponent, with his backroom dealing and corporate coddling and dynastic affiliations, who stands as the role-player and the phony.

Many have found Cuomo’s sincerity as a progressive Democrat dubious, if not entirely unconvincing, but the problem for Nixon is that as a performer of related ideologies in recent years, he has done quite well. Ever since Zephyr Teachout, an unknown law professor, challenged him for his second-term run in 2014 to surprising results in the primary, he has been forced to tack left — signing legislation two years ago to enact a $15 an hour minimum wage as well as paid family leave. More recently he proposed a sweeping package of criminal justice reforms that would, among other actions, eliminate monetary bail and reduce delays and adjournments in court proceedings that keep people unnecessarily in jail.

As a feminist, too, his stagecraft has been successful. On Monday, as Nixon said she would run, Cuomo directed the state attorney general to review the ways in which the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., had handled — or mishandled — a 2015 allegation of sexual assault against Harvey Weinstein.

In her speech Tuesday, Nixon called for a greater investment in the city’s ever-deteriorating public housing system. Only a few days earlier, during an appearance at the Jackson Houses in the Bronx, the governor, who served as the federal housing secretary under President Bill Clinton, said he was prepared to declare a state of emergency in the buildings of the New York City Housing Authority — which would allow him to replace its failing management team, appointed by the city. He also promised to release $200 million of state funds to the agency once an independent monitor had been appointed to oversee all that has gone wrong.

In the ongoing war between the governor and Mayor Bill de Blasio, it has been Cuomo who has been continually advancing, amounting to another hindrance for Nixon. A longtime public education activist, she has been a strong supporter of the mayor’s — but de Blasio, who is so intensely disliked by so many of his own Democratic constituents, could provide her with little advantage in her own race. Within two hours of Nixon’s speech on Tuesday, the former City Council speaker Christine Quinn, openly gay and an ally of the governor’s, declared via The New York Post that Nixon was an “unqualified lesbian” who should not have opposed her own more viable bid to become the mayor of New York several years ago when de Blasio won his first term.

Quinn lost, in part, because she was unable to come up with a pitch that voters found as resonant as de Blasio’s “tale of two cities” rhetoric, his focus on the vast gaps between the rich and the disadvantaged. Nixon wants to stand in the same philosophical space, railing against the unaffordable city, the tyranny of urban plutocrats. But she earned her celebrity and fortune through a pop cultural product, “Sex and the City,” that promoted a vision of New York that stands entirely in opposition to her professed values. It was the HBO series, beyond any other entertainment, that helped solidify the image of the city as a luxury brand — an elite, fantastical consumer paradise where it was never too early or late in the day to buy an $800 pair of shoes.

Is Cynthia Nixon, ultimately, the best vessel for her own invaluable message?

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

The actress, the governor and performance politics

NEW YORK — On a frigid Tuesday morning in Brooklyn, Cynthia Nixon, in her first official campaign venture, made the case for herself to become the next governor of New York, an impassioned liberal who would lead vigorously from the left.

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