Getting to Third Base with Tom Suozzi and Other Members of the Lucky Sperm Club

Has Alec Baldwin lost weight recently?

Actually, that's Tom Suozzi, the Long Island Executive (something like mayor of Long Island) who's running a kamikaze primary campaign against so-close-he's-precumming Democratic New York gubernatorial nominee Eliot Spitzer.

Why am I blogging about this longshot Spitzer opponent? Because Tom Suozzi is the good-lucking Dubya.

When my friend saw my copy of the New York Press opened to this gushy Suozzi profile, she sincerely exclaimed "Oooh, cute Gary Cooper pic! What are they re-releasing?"

No doubt about it, his father married a pretty girl. Every single Suozzi profile mentions his looks, such as here, where the heterosexual man-crush is like embarrassing Brokeback Mountain slash fiction [n.b.: recent highly scientific studies prove that gratuitously mentioning Brokeback Mountain raises blog readership by 39%].

In New York politics, where this man is considered a "hottie," the notoriously frumpy politicos in Albany are probably hardwired to dislike this prettyboy deep in the reptilian parts of their brains. I dislike his candidacy for other reasons. It is not fair to fault Suozzi for being pretty. It is fair to fault him for perpetuating a disturbing trend in American politics.

Suozzi is the scion (epigone?) of a hugely powerful Long Island political dynasty, yet he is also, oddly, running as an outsider, because he waged a campaign to "fix Albany"(drawing attention to and cleaning up a very lucrative statewide Medicaid scam that basically burned all his bridges with the vengeful Albany kingmakers Sheldon Silver and Denny Farrell -- something that I respect, but would respect more if I didn't know that he had daddy's rolodex to cushion his fall).

What kind of an outsider is also the kind of guy who, when Albany blacklists him, cries on the shoulder of Harold Ickes (the prominent Clinton campaigner who happens to be Suozzi's dad's law partner)?

The kind of guy who was born on third and thinks he's hit a triple (that's a link to a very good post by Arianna Huffington about how Bush and Sulzberger are part of the "Lucky Sperm Club" -- though as I said above, I think Suozzi also benefitted from some conveniently pretty genes from his mother's ovum, and anyhow, Arianna mocking the lucky sperm club is a bit like me mocking people addicted to coffee. Which, of course, I do all the time). As reported in the NY Press piece above, "big or small, Suozzis 'were celebrities in Glen Cove,' remembers Yonkers City Council president, Democrat Chuck Lesnick. 'I was 11 and he was eight. And I remember his cousin Vinny ‘cause Vinny’s dad was mayor [of Glen Cove] and Tom’s dad had been mayor prior to that, so they were celebrities.'”

Very touching. The parallels between Dubya and Suozzi are disturbing. And let's not even mention Cuomo Jr., or any of those Kennedys (who seem to get more and more physically repulsive and irrelevant with each spawning).

Then there are the "Marrying In" guys: Schwarzenegger, Nixon's stepson (whatever his name is), and the annoying dude with "white house" in his eyes who's been banging Chelsea Clinton ever since he got his first bottle of Viagra. Exactly how does successfully navigating your way out of your mother's vag (or into someone else's) qualify you for higher office? When did our country develop an aristocracy?

"But why," you ask, "should being born into that family disqualify him from the family business?" Fair enough, except that it's part of a larger trend, and while it's not too bad from the perspective of any individual, overall I would say that any trend that leads to a presidential election between two mediocre losers like Dubya and Gore is not healthy for our democracy.

And don't forget: The Clintons and Bloombergs of the world only have a bourgeois-appropriate one or two kids apiece, but those Bushies multiply like sea monkeys.

spitzerbushsuozzinew yorkgovernorelectionhuffingtonhuffington postclinton