New York Diary

I’ve always loved the Christmas (or rather Hulliday) season in New York because it’s so unapologetically, materialistically over the top. You want tinsel? No tinsel is fatter and furrier than New York tinsel. You want twinkling lights? It’s Vegas on 57th where we live. Even tangerines here are shinier and fatter, although some of those groaning fruit baskets that arrive look suspiciously familiar. ‘Re-gifting’ — as the practice of putting expensive presents into instant turnaround is known here — has become as openly acknowledged a seasonal custom as baking gingerbread houses. In the swanky lobbies of Upper East Side apartment buildings you invariably spot some towering floral arrangement with a deftly rewritten snowman card making its second journey of the day past the peaked hats of the doormen.

The difference this year is that the conversations at holiday parties are unseasonably political. Now that the voting dates in the ‘early states’ have been scrunched forward to just after New Year’s Day, the only thing people want to talk about in New York is which Democrat will win Iowa and New Hampshire. The Barack Obama surge — the pollsters have him sprinting ahead — is a counterintuitive nightmare for Hillary Clinton. The prospect of becoming the first female president of the United States was Hillary’s clarion call to history — until Obama trumped her with the promise of becoming the first black one. Bedevilling both are the paradoxical, mirror-image facts that Hillary, whose exceptionalism is based on being a woman, hasn’t been winning over quite enough women and Barack, whose exceptionalism is based on being black, hasn’t been winning over quite enough blacks. That’s why it’s holy hell for Hill that the one person who’s an answer to both problems — Oprah Winfrey, the all powerful African-American talk-show queen, who would surely have been a cinch for Clinton if Obama hadn’t got into the act — is out there drawing rock-star crowds, stumping for Obama (30,000 showed up in New Hampshire last weekend, most of them black).