Ed Rendell: Power: The Governor, the Blonde and the Rumor Mill

So finally, I simply ask: “Are you having an affair with the Governor?”

“Absolutely not,” she says. “No way. And if I had a nickel for everybody who told me that, or told me they heard that, I wouldn’t have to come to my job.”

Kirstin Snow is surprised it’s taken this long for the whispers to develop into full-fledged rumors. And she says she worries about the gossip hurting Midge Rendell, given her own closeness to the First Lady:

“She came to my son’s school last year and read a book about Barack Obama’s run for president to my son’s kindergarten class. It was Obama’s Pajamas. It gets a little mushy at the end — it’s very patriotic, talks a lot about Martin Luther King and civil rights, so she started to cry. And my son got up and got her a tissue.”

I tell Snow what we’ve been hearing: that Ed Rendell is telling friends she’s the love of his life, that he’s fallen big-time for her.

“Really!” For a moment Snow is quiet. “O-kay,” she says slowly. “That’s a surprise to me. That makes me a little uncomfortable. … I’ll ask him” about that.

Kirstin Snow ponders what the Governor’s answer might be. “I guess I’ll find out,” she says.

That Kirstin Snow seems to talk to me with the ease and freedom of someone with nothing to hide proves nothing, of course. It’s also impossible to prove there isn’t anything going on between Snow and the Governor. Though Ed Rendell certainly gives it a shot in his state office in the Bellevue the next day, starting with why they ended up at Famous 4th Street Deli together:

“She was with me all day. Kirstin is the best I have in terms of understanding the media. I was doing nine TV shots. Some before lunch, some after. She was managing that. What was I gonna say? ‘Sit in the car’? That’s ludicrous.”

It isn’t lost on Ed Rendell that Kirstin is attractive. She’s useful as his companion at fund-raisers — “At this point, I need to have some pizzazz to get people to give me money.” Plus, Midge, because she’s a judge, can’t go to many political events. Kirstin seems to accompany Rendell to a lot of meetings and events. The reason she popped up at, say, an introduction to new Inquirer and Daily News CEO Greg Osberg is simple, Rendell says: “She’s a media person. She was [in my Philly office] that day. Who better to talk to Greg Osberg than a media person? She didn’t say a lot. She observed.”

I ask the Governor about the speculation — for example, that he lost so much weight because he’s having an affair.

“You know, like a lot of people in politics, I get hit on by women all the time. There are political groupies just like there are sports groupies. I got hit on when I was 260 every bit as much as when I’m 200.” Rendell says he lost the weight because Midge and his son Jesse dogged him about it.