Is it up to the Clintons to spare us the sight of Anthony Weiner running for mayor? The Weiner campaign, which presented itself as a redemption narrative and then turned, last week, into what Nancy Pelosi called a public therapy session, now appears to be an act of sheer exhibitionism, driven by nothing but the candidate’s willingness to make a spectacle of himself. Perhaps that explains why it’s still going on: we know, even if we wish we didn’t, that Weiner likes that sort of thing. He’s not going to stop on his own.
Weiner, as he persists in campaigning, keeps telling New Yorkers that he’s made “a bet” that “citizens care more about their own future than about my past with my wife and my embarrassing things”—as if the voters who turned away from him were the unserious ones here. There are a few problems with that formulation. First, voters care about Weiner’s past with them, his honesty with them; what he’d said about being a changed man since being caught doing this the last time does not appear to have been true at all. Second, voters are allowed to treat sending sex messages to virtual strangers as a proxy for how reckless and undisciplined a man in Weiner’s position is likely to be in office. And these episodes also seem to say something about how Weiner deals with women other than his wife—specifically, young women who are interested in politics. He found his sexting counterparties through politics, converting conversations that had initially been about his campaign or speeches or policies. How many approaches did he make to young women who were really not interest in seeing pictures of him naked, and how discouraging might that have been for them in thinking about politics as a profession?
And how unwelcome is Weiner’s scandal for a particular woman in politics—Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin’s boss and mentor? Weiner’s implicit defense is that if we can forgive Bill Clinton, we can forgive him—have to forgive him. This may be his most careless use of one his few remaining assets: his wife’s connections with the Clintons and the sympathy for her in those circles. Hillary Clinton, if she’s running for President in 2016, does not want voters to think about the compromises she made to get to that position, or about anything but her own achievements. (“How dare they compare Huma with Hillary?,” a “top state democrat” told the New York Post’s Fredric Dicker. “Hillary was the First Lady. Hillary was a senator. She was Secretary of State.”) And she certainly would not want voters to weigh whether they want to risk going through all that theatre again with the Clintons. What would get Weiner out of the race? Maybe only a crackdown from the Clintons, although, as Andrew Sullivan notes, there is a bit of revisionism and shamelessness in the Clintonian outrage. To point that out is not to warm toward Weiner, but to cool toward Hillary.
If the Clintons are the ghosts of scandals past, Bob Filner, the mayor of San Diego, who is in the middle of a major sexual-harassment scandal, is the ghost of mayors future. On Friday, Filner said that he was embarking on a course of full-time intensive therapy; he had already been told not to meet with women in city offices alone. San Diego is a great city, but New York is a much bigger and more complicated one, and one can too easily see Weiner at a similar press conference, city business in a shambles.
Over the weekend, Weiner’s campaign manager, Danny Kedem, quit, raising the question of whether he knew what he was getting into when he signed on. The day before, Weiner had said that he had had sexualized online exchanges with up to three women after having to resign from Congress (“I don’t believe I had any more than three”); the question there might be whether any of the names he used with the two we haven’t heard from yet are as mortifying as “Carlos Danger.” Before and after leaving Congress, there were six to ten, although, he told reporters, “I can’t tell you absolutely what someone else is going to consider inappropriate or not”—which is pretty much his problem.
The mayor’s race is a crowded field. The competition, among Democrats, is for the two spots in a runoff, since no one candidate is likely to get over forty per cent. This is where Weiner could do some harm, not by winning, but by edging out a potential second-place finisher—Bill de Blasio or William Thompson—behind the frontrunner, Christine Quinn, who might actually have something to add to the discourse other than pictures of himself. (A new poll has him in fourth place, four per cent behind Thompson.) To get by in New York, you need to have two things: a high tolerance for the crazy, and a finely tuned radar for the creepy. Weiner benefited from the first for a long time. Now, he’s just setting off alarms.
Photograph by Spencer Platt/Getty.
