Anthony Weiner had a bad Sunday. His campaign manager quit this weekend, and on Sunday, a confidante of the Clintons said they want him to drop out of the New York mayor's race. There are also new questions about $43,100 of campaign money he spent in 2011.
Democratic candidate for New York City mayor Anthony Weiner speaks to members of Brownsville Community Baptist Church in the Brooklyn borough of New York Sunday.
Eduardo Munoz/Reuters
Enlarge[Updated 6:30 p.m. EDT] Whatever one may think about Anthony Weiner, he has no small amount of pluck.
Skip to next paragraph Mark SappenfieldStaff writer
Mark is deputy national news editor for the Monitor.
Recent posts
' +
google_ads[0].line2 + '
' +
google_ads[0].line3 + '
Subscribe Today to the Monitor
Weiner's campaign limps forwardThat was true when he was a member of Congress, where he sometimes spoke from the House floor in a verbal conflagration on the order of Sherman blazing through Atlanta. It was true when he entered the race for New York mayor two years after resigning from Congress in disgrace ? the titters of disbelief still audible in the press gallery. And it remains true today, when he has not pointedly not listened to his former leader in the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, who captured the feeling of many Americans in telling Mr. Weiner to "get a clue" and drop out of the mayoral race.
But at this point, is sheer force of will enough to get him to Election Day on Nov. 5?
On one hand, Weiner's refusal to drop out of the race speaks to underlying political realities, some of which don't look all that bad.
True, what we learned Tuesday is undeniably awful. It turns out that a year after the married congressman was forced to resign from his post in Washington because he was trading raunchy and racy online posts with single women (and then lying about it), he was still doing it.
But in a way, that makes his run for mayor this year all the more important. While it's possible he could have a third act at some distant future, the new revelations ? heaped on the previous revelations ? mean he either wins this race or he's taking a long siesta from politics. That's something he clearly doesn't want to contemplate.
Moreover, he and his wife, Huma Abedin, seemed prepared for all this. Never mind that he called himself "Carlos Danger" and carried on explicitly sexual conversations with a 20-something named Sydney Leathers last year, to them it's old news, and regardless of this baggage, they think he is a politician that can help New York. They seem happy to let the voters decide one way or the other.
And while future polls could get worse, he's hardly out of the picture ? still in second place with 19 percent of the vote compared with 25 percent for front-runner Christine Quinn. He's also go plenty of money for the time being. In fact, Weiner has $4.8 million, second only to Ms. Quinn's $6 million, according to a report by the New York Daily News published a week before the new scandal surfaced.
So it's possible that, for Weiner, things are playing out largely as he expected in a worst-case scenario. For someone who had the pluck to run for mayor of America's biggest apple two years after being paraded in public in the Internet age's answer to tar and feathers, a week of bad press might not seem a game-changer.
march madness Masters Leaderboard 2013 How Animals Eat Their Food Aereo Masters 2013 Lone Star College 42
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.