The unraveling of Anthony Weiner
By EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE and MAGGIE HABERMAN |
7/31/13
Anthony Weiner has lost his mind.
At least, that’s the conclusion most Democrats have come to.
There’s really no other way they can explain how he’s handled the revelations of his post-resignation sexts and his combative encounters with voters over the weekend looking for him to quit the mayor’s race. But Monday night’s needlessly dismissive brush off of the Clintons — the first family of Democratic politics who consider his wife a second daughter — surprised even people who thought they couldn’t be surprised anymore by his political self-destructiveness.
And all for a campaign that’s plummeting in the polls and heading, with every passing hour, toward a seemingly more inevitable fiery end.
The question at this point isn’t whether he’ll win or be able to use his 2013 campaign to purge memories of his 2011 humiliation. It’s just how defiant and, his critics argue, delusional, Weiner will get.
He recently suggested, for example, that the latest sexting revelations, and whatever else may be coming, will actually benefit him in the race and once he gets to City Hall. “I’m going to be a successful mayor because of it,” he told the Staten Island Advance, “because it’s going to give me a level of independence.”
Somewhat amazingly, he tried for sympathy about being betrayed by his online liaisons — people, Weiner told the Daily News, “who I thought were friends, people I trusted when I communicated with them.”
But the topper may have been Monday night, when he made another unforced and flagrant foul. Responding to reports that associates of Bill and Hillary Clinton believe they want him out of the race, Weiner said the opinions of the man who gave Huma Abedin away to him at their wedding and his wife’s long-time boss — who also happen to be a former Democratic president and potentially future one — don’t matter to him because they live in Westchester.
“I am not terribly interested in what people who are not voters in the city of New York have to say,” Weiner said, even as Abedin was in Washington staffing Hillary Clinton for her visits with President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.
“He looks a guy who’s at the deep end of the pool and he really doesn’t know how to swim. For a guy whose whole reputation was how smart a political guy he was, how good he was on camera, how quick witted he was, this is part of the process of unraveling,” said Bill Cunningham, a former communications director for Mayor Mike Bloomberg.
Weiner’s got two options, Cunningham said: Keep taking questions that prompt more incredible answers or refuse to speak about the scandal and get accused of going into hiding.
“Either way,” Cunningham said, “he’s caught in this spiral.”
Several Democrats who knew him when he was in Congress believe the recent display is who Weiner actually is — an unvarnished version, perhaps, stripped of the protection of a government office and membership to the Washington club, but the real Weiner nonetheless.
“Remember, this is someone who thought he was unfairly pushed from office,” said one source, referring to the initial days of scandal in 2011, when he admitted to sending messages he’d initially claimed were the work of hackers. In private conversations with Democratic leadership at the time, Weiner defiantly insisted he shouldn’t have to quit, since he had broken no laws and his mistakes were personal failings, multiple sources said.
His mantra then was “let the voters decide.” The mayoral campaign, and this last week in particular, have taken that to an extreme degree.
“I think this is the real Anthony. … He saw himself as a contender,” said one veteran operative who knows Weiner.
The problem now, the operative said, is not so much Weiner’s behavior as his “truthfulness” in describing it publicly.
More than anything, even people who thought Weiner had a real shot at making a mayoral runoff have expressed surprise that he didn’t get everything out in the open in a New York Times magazine profile that effectively kicked off his campaign.
Weiner’s every event now has a carnival-like quality. On Tuesday, his beleaguered press aide, Barbara Morgan, told reporters ahead of a candidates’ forum that he would speak to them after the event, which proved untrue when the spindly Weiner walked briskly down the stairs and away from the throng giving chase.
A CNN reporter yelled a question at him about whether he’d fired off any recent sexts, after he gave a fuzzy answer to the Daily News. A debate ensued between the reporter and Morgan as to whether Weiner actually answered the question. “He said no,” Morgan said repeatedly.
Even in an age of resurrections — Eliot Spitzer is running ahead for city comptroller, and Andrew Dice Clay got himself a starring role in the new Woody Allen movie — Weiner is pushing the limits. Instead of using 2013 to wipe 2011 clean from people’s minds and give him a fresh start for the next run, he’s brought the scandal back into the present and created more bad blood than there ever was when he resigned in tears.
New Yorkers appear to have gotten tired of the performance. A Quinnipiac poll out Monday showed not just that he’d tumbled to fourth place, but that 53 percent of New Yorkers want him out of the race. The reservoir of good will and second chances appears to be heading quickly down the drain, and Weiner is at the dangerous point for a politician where many people would be ready to believe just about anything about him and doubt every word that comes out of his mouth.
Weiner’s response has been defiance, still appearing to try to outsmart questions and refusing direct answers. He told a woman over the weekend who asked how he could run after behavior that would have gotten her fired that he was moving on to other voters he might be able to win.
If there is any a strategy left, Weiner’s hope seems to be that the rest of the field remains weak enough and that New Yorkers remain susceptible enough to his street bruiser politicking charm that he’ll be able to recover ahead of the Sept. 10 primary. He’ll try to tap into the same New Yorker spirit that responded to Ed Koch — a coalition of had-it-up-to-here and outer-borough voters who responded to the former mayor’s puckishness and middle-class pitch that put him over the top in the equally crowded 1977 Democratic primary.
Weiner has made the Koch comparison himself explicitly before. He even made it to Koch directly before the former mayor died, looking for an endorsement by arguing “I’m trying to be just like you,” recalled Koch’s former press secretary and confidant, George Arzt.
Koch said no. “There’s something about Weiner that just irritated Koch,” Arzt, now a New York-based Democratic consultant, said.
Weiner is proving every day just how unlike Koch he is, Arzt argued, and how deep in trouble he’s gotten.
“He’s a guy who’s run amok. He’s in desperate shape, and he’s just trying to find a way to salvage a public career — not only a political career,” he said. “He looks like a punch-drunk guy trying to survive the fight, and he’s just wobbling around the ring, and getting hit with every punch from all directions.”
As Weiner tells the story, he’s Rocky (circa Rocky II).
“I think in an odd way, this is a great test for the kind of mayor I will be,” he said in the Daily News interview. “I will not quit on my stool.”
But Cunningham said New York is past the point of caring whether or not Weiner wants to give up.
“Once you become a punch line, once you become a running joke and once you start to show flashes of temper and annoyance at questions about a situation he himself created,” he said, “I think you’ve kicked out all the legs of the three-legged stool.”
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