New York Magazine Has a Crush on Huma Abedin
Anthony Weiner's media campaign tour stopped this week at New York magazine, but it's his wife who seems to becoming the star of his show. The profile of Weiner by Mark Jacobson in this week's issue is your standard mayoral candidate rundown and is mostly a re-telling of (and occasional referencer of) The New York Times Magazine profile which unofficially launched Weiner's political comeback.
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But Isaac Chotiner noticed another recurring theme in the story: The overly fawning descriptions of Weiner's wife (and political partner-in-crime) Huma Abedin. Chotiner pointed a few of them out on The New Republic's website, but even that didn't do the flowerly prose justice. Here are all the ways the story's author, Mark Jacobson, refers to Abedin in his story:
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"the extraordinary Ms. Abedin"
"among Hillary Clinton’s most trusted, not to mention most photogenic, aides."
"the exemplary Huma"
"this stellar woman, who could have married anyone"
"If it was a mystery why Huma Abedin decided Anthony Weiner was the man for her..."
"It was quite possible that she was the most cosmopolitan human being on Earth. Compared to her, [Weiner] was an outer-borough schmoe"
All this after Jacboson declared that Weiner's own description of his wife ("this intriguing, fascinating creature") in The New York Times "seemed on the creepy side." As creepy as this armchair psychology about just how dumb Weiner was for flirting with the disaster of getting dumped by her?
How insane, how self-destructive, must he have been to have risked losing a life with this woman? Only someone who felt down deep that he didn’t deserve such good fortune would have pulled something so twisted and dumb. But what marvelous relief it must have been to stare into Huma’s eyes and feel forgiven. You could get drunk on such forgiveness.
Then, finally, there's tour-de-force paragraph, which reads more like the torn page of a romance novel than a political profile:
She approached in a knit white top and navy-blue business skirt, her dark, almost black hair down to her shoulders. She wore bright-red lipstick, which gave her lips a 3-D look, her brown eyes were pools of empathy evolved through a thousand generations of what was good and decent in the history of the human race. The harsh, cheap buck lighting in the coffee shop couldn’t lay a glove on her. By the time she sat down, the harmony of angels had vanquished the tinny background music from every corporate space on the planet. Of course, you’d seen pictures before. But you’d also seen pictures of the Taj Mahal. It didn’t quite come up to actually being there.
Ok, we get it. She's a very a nice lady (who could do a lot better than her weirdo of a husband.) Oh, and just in case you were wondering if that's how Jacobson writes about everyone, here's his one and only description of her husband's main opponent, Christine Quinn.
With her burnt-orange hair and blackboard-screech pronunciation, Quinn has the look of someone who could actually be a mayor of the City of New York, to tourists at least.
