THE NEW YORKER JOHN CASSIDY
Barely a week after he officially entered the Democratic primary for the mayoralty of New York City, Anthony Weiner has reason to be cheerful. On Tuesday, a Marist College poll showed the recovering sex-tweeter running second to Christine Quinn, the City Council Speaker. And the media is suddenly taking Weiner seriously. Politico’s Maggie Haberman, after spending some time with the former congressman on the stump, reports that he “bears an uncanny resemblance to the pugnacious, hard-charging Anthony Weiner of old.” ....
... the other candidates, including Bill Thompson, the former city comptroller who ran Mike Bloomberg a close second in the 2009 general election; the public advocate Bill de Blasio; and John Liu, the current comptroller. In the new poll, none of them got more than twelve per cent. Weiner received nineteen per cent, and Quinn, widely regarded as the favorite, got twenty-four per cent. To avoid a run-off, the leading candidate has to get at least forty per cent of the vote.
Now, getting nineteen per cent of the potential vote three months before the primary election, scheduled for September 10th, is hardly cause for booking a victory celebration. But for Weiner it represents an encouraging start. As Zeff and others have pointed out, he entered the race with a number of advantages, including name recognition, money—more than five million dollars left over from previous campaigns—a divided opposition, and an affinity with the base of the Democratic Party. The big unknown was the crotch-shot factor. Would New Yorkers be willing to overlook his scandalous fall from Congress? According to the Marist poll, at least, the answer is yes. Fifty-nine per cent of registered Democrats said he deserved another chance, and fifty-three per cent of all registered voters said the same thing.
That’s the potential upside for Weiner. The downside comes in two parts. First, there’s always the possibility that the Twitter ruckus will come back to bite him. And even if it doesn’t, there are questions about his track record, and his lack of experience in running anything nearly as complex as a major city. Of the two concerns, I think the second may be the biggest threat to Weiner’s hopes.
-------
As this stage, Weiner’s rivals can’t simply assume that the aura of scandal will sink his campaign. That doesn’t mean they can’t attack him and do some damage, though. But rather than ask whether he’s fit to be mayor—a question they will largely leave to the media—the other candidates are likely to focus on whether he’s qualified to run a city of more than eight million people.
On that, even a charitable reading of the record suggests that Weiner will have some persuading to do. As a young Brooklyn city councilman, from 1992 to 1998, he was a diligent constituent representative and a publicity seeker. But putting troubled local kids to work cleaning up graffiti and persuading the city to repaint the stairwells of its housing developments—two achievements he listed on his congressional Web site—hardly compares with leading the City Council (Quinn), managing the seven-hundred-member staff in the comptroller’s office (Thompson and Liu), or acting as the city’s primary public watchdog (de Blasio).
As the congressman for New York’s ninth district, which is carved out of Brooklyn and Queens, Weiner served with his trademark energy and ferocity, but he was largely removed from local debates on things like education, transport, and crime. ...
Then there is the question of whether Weiner would be an effective administrator and leader, something Bloomberg has built his mayoralty on. Congressmen don’t run much except their own offices, and, even in that modest endeavor, Weiner was hardly known as a great manager. According to a 2008 story in the Times, his office was a revolving door, as staff members came and went, many of them alienated by his abrasive manner and his temper tantrums.
To be sure, Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani were hardly known as nurturers, and neither is Bloomberg. Weiner’s harsh edges could conceivably work to his advantage. New Yorkers like having a tough guy (or gal) in City Hall. But they also want one who has shown enough to suggest that he (or she) could run the city. In the weeks and months ahead, meeting that test will be Weiner’s biggest challenge.