Am I Allowed To Write About Politics?

Probably not, but hey!, our editor just quit. So... No, seriously, I am probably not, so let me begin by saying that I went to hear Joe Klein talk about the upcoming American elections in London last night and his wife was there. She is seriously stylish and was wearing a black dress, thick cream cable-knit bolero, chunky, industrial-looking necklace.

Anyway, I've got a sort of love-hate relationship with Joe. Love because he's just so darn optimistic. And because he had the guts to come back to the UK after a dressing-down by the lefty audience at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival a few years back. In a talk with Christopher Hitchens in the year after we embarked on the Iraq war, he let slip that he believed America to be "the most benign superpower in history." Or maybe "the most benign superpower the world has ever known." (I didn't take notes, but you get the idea.) Well, you can imagine what happened next. That night Yann Martel told me, "the problem is that Joe Klein speaks from the heart and Hitchens has all of these facts at his disposal." Um.

Anyway, I'm still kinda mad at him for not coming clean about being Anonymous until it was just way too late. Particularly annoying when he criticizes Hillary Clinton for not disclosing meaningless Whitewater documents. And I often think he's wrong. So since it was a very small audience -- at one point he said, to a room full of journalists, "Is this off the record?" -- and because I didn't really get to fully voice my opinions during the Q&A, I'm going to blog it. I'll try to throw in fashion where I can.

Joe (wearing a dark suit) said that Americans are now able to detect the stench of spin. What they want is authenticity. "It's about who would you want to have a beer with?," he said. Then he said: "Authenticity is harder to fake than courage." (He was crediting Hillary Clinton with Courage.) I think just the opposite. Look at those shots of W on the military boats in the green bomber jacket! Courage is easy to fake.

He also said "Guliani is very, very bright" but has surrounded himself with some very scary right-wingers. So, um, how bright is that?

There was more about the great promise of Obama and how crazily unpredictable Iowans are and how "unsettled" Americans are by, well, what I wrote was: "global threat, immigration, technological threat" and how this could all make for a really exciting election. Sure, if the people who were unsettled by those things were the same ones who voted, but I still think it's primarily the strength of one's own pocket book that motivates voters.

Then the Q&A came. Simon Schama (grey suit, possibly pin-striped) said the "elephant in the room was Bill Clinton." Will he help her or hurt her? A guy from You.Gov (dark suit) asked what had happened to the middle ground in the U.S. (Catholics have it, said Klein) and a "professional young person" (yes, another dark suit) talked about the internet. And, at some point, Klein spoke of how his parents told him about how they'd listen to Franklin Roosevelt on the radio and were instructed to put pins on a map of the world. It was cute, but a tiny bit sad.

I (grey Helmut Lang sweater, wide-legged jeans and Angelo Figus shoes) said that I think the elephant in the room is that we have a woman and a black as serious candidates. Can either really be elected? Schama said he thinks a woman can be elected, but only if her name isn't Clinton. I suspect it is just the opposite.

Anyway, now back to your regular programming.