“I’m starting to get upset," said Melissa George, the pretty blonde with the pouty lips and cat-like eyes who plays Laura on the HBO series In Treatment. "I want Hillary to get it.”
Ms. George was standing around with her husband, Claudio Dabed, looking healthy and politically-minded in a floral minidress at a cocktail party at the Hermes store in the Financial district that was cross-marketing the new $2.3 million Bugatti Veyron automobile. (The vaunted leather-goods and fashion house did the interiors.)
Ms. George’s Australian accent gives her origins away, but she feels strongly enough about American politics that she became a citizen last year, she said, so that she could vote in this presidential election.
(She’s looking for a place right now incidentally—"downtown in Chelsea or Tribeca"—so, you know, if you hear of anything …)
“If Hillary runs it, you get Bill Clinton too, which is the best president we’ve ever had," she said, echoing one of the best messages of the Clinton campaign that seldom gets said out loud. "Then if Obama becomes vice president, he can get the experience through Hillary, and in eight years time, he can become president. That’s the way it should be.”
Jewelry designer, actor and man-about-town Waris Ahluwalia was standing nearby. He was less sure about the election.
"I’m perplexed," he said. "I watched each candidate talk about topics like health care and the economy on YouTube, which is kind of great except that when you get through it all, you’re like, ‘they didn’t actually say anything!’ and that’s kind of a bummer."
When the politics turned closer to home, Mr. Ahluwalia’s remarks were pointed more at the media than at the shallowness of political campaigns.
"I have something to say that will probably shock you and the team at the Observer," he said, when asked about Client No. 9. "Everyone fornicates, even the governor, it comes with the job if you’re a politician."
Oh, Waris, we knew that! But his ebullience on the topic was not to be so easily stoppered.
"Thomas Jefferson? George Washington? Fornicators! And we still let them do their jobs."
"I just hope someone gets elected, it could be a first where no one gets elected and then it’s like self-governance, also called anarchy," he said. "For a while I actually started telling people that I was going to vote for Huckabee just to throw them off. Who doesn’t love the Christian right?"
