It’s exciting when TV stars run for office, especially because the ones who get elected are indubitably wonderful — just terrific, fantastic — public servants.
But Cynthia Nixon will have an outsized impact if she causes Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) to embrace marijuana legalization during their competition to win the Democratic primary on Sept. 13.
Of course, the Democrats who control the Assembly side of the NY Legislature were ready to legalize marijuana yesterday. So if Gov. Cuomo is reelected this fall, he’ll want to engage with the Republicans in the state Senate to pass a legalization bill in the first half of 2019, in order to tout his liberal credentials to Democratic voters in NH and other states that hold early primary presidential elections and caucuses in Q1 of 2020.
How far we’ve come since I started working on the marijuana issue in 1990! Back then, Democrats would lie about their marijuana use while promoting policies to punish others for the same youthful “indiscretion.” This behavior later became known as healthier but fake-regrettable “experimentation,” which then somehow transmogrified into people like former Sen. Joe Lieberman (??-CT) apologizing for not having used marijuana.
More recently, Sen. Bernie Sanders (??-VT) was ascendant partially because he supports legalizing marijuana for healthy and sick people alike. And now it’s a truism in smart Democratic circles that legalizing marijuana will actually boost your presidential campaign. And what your lungs were doing many years ago isn’t even relevant.