Alec Baldwin for mayor in 2013?
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In an interview with The New York Times, Alec Baldwin opens up about his political ambitions. Due to his 30 Rock contract, which requires him to film through April 2012, he does not expect to run for mayor of New York City in 2013. Instead, he plans to enroll in a master’s program in politics and government in the fall of 2012 “to help me better understand what the fiscal imperatives of that job are,” he tells the Times. “What’s the reality of the city unions, of contracts, agreements, teachers, infrastructure, decentralizing, everything? And utilities, Con Ed, the M.T.A. — how does it all work?”
Baldwin says he doesn’t see voters holding his past scandals — a nasty divorce from Kim Basinger that played out in public with a leaked answering-machine message on which he’s heard calling his daughter, then 11, a “pig” — against him. Nor does he think his star status will impede voters from feeling connected to him. “There are people who make a lot of money who become rich people, and then there are people who make a lot of money, but they don’t think like rich people do,” he says. “No matter how much money they have, they are the same from their own upbringing. I would definitely put myself in the latter class.” (Though his legal residence is in Amagansett, on Long Island, he’s owned a home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for more than 20 years, the Times reports, and he’s moving downtown to be closer to his girlfriend, Hilaria Thomas, a yoga instructor with degrees in art history and dance from NYU who’s more than 20 years his junior.)
Still, it has occurred to the 53-year-old actor that he might be in for a surprise: “I am someone who is fully prepared for the fact that I could go into this and do it and completely have my ass kicked,” he says. “I could throw a party and no one could come. And it would be this staggering lesson for me.”
Would you consider voting for Alec Baldwin some day? Or would you prefer another celebrity on the ballot?
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