DEBLASIO TAKES LEAD IN MAYORAL POLL

N.Y. TIMES

In a jolt to the Democratic campaign for mayor, a new poll suggests that Bill de Blasio, the most liberal of the leading candidates, has vaulted into first place among likely voters.

With one month to go until the Sept. 10 primary, Mr. de Blasio has now passed Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker, who had led in most polls for months, although her lead had already narrowed.

Until a month or so ago, Mr. de Blasio had been mired in fourth place, about 10 points behind Ms. Quinn. He was then overtaken by former Representative Anthony D. Weiner, who momentarily overwhelmed the field after entering the race. More recently, Mr. de Blasio was battling for second place with William C. Thompson Jr., a former comptroller.

The new Quinnipiac University survey of 579 likely Democratic voters in the Sept. 10 primary found Mr. de Blasio, who has been an outspoken critic of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg on policing and other issues, with the support of 30 percent of voters. Ms. Quinn had 24 percent, Mr. Thompson 22 percent, and Mr. Weiner was down to 10 percent.

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But Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, suggested that the numbers would most likely continue to change, especially because most of the candidates have just begun to air television commercials.

 

 

COULD WEINER BE THE NEXT MAYOR OF NYC?

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.
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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.

Anthony Weiner Announces Candidacy for New York Mayor in Video

N.Y. TIMES

Anthony D. Weiner, once a rising star of New York politics whose career cratered over revelations of his sexually explicit life online, announced an improbable bid on Wednesday for the job he has long coveted: mayor.

After a rocky re-emergence into public life over the past few weeks, marked by circuslike scenes of tabloid photographers chasing him onto the subway, Mr. Weiner opted to declare his candidacy from the safe remove of a video.

The two-minute video, which was posted without comment to a YouTube site affiliated with Mr. Weiner’s campaign, is a slickly produced argument for the former congressman’s candidacy. In the video, he briefly, and obliquely, acknowledges wrongdoing, but focuses his time on asserting that he has the experience and determination to help New York deal with issues of unaffordability, education and public safety.

“Look, I made some big mistakes, and I know I let a lot of people down,'’ he says. “But I’ve also learned a lot of lessons.”

His candidacy, fueled by a $5 million war chest and a determination to resurrect his public standing, promises to immediately disrupt a wide open Democratic primary race populated by several lesser-known candidates.

But it is beset by heavy baggage, starting with the deep ambivalence of voters to whom Mr. Weiner lied two years ago, when he indignantly, and falsely, denied that he had sent an Internet image of himself in his underwear to a college student in Seattle.

Mr. Weiner, 48, eventually admitted to a secret practice of befriending young female admirers over the Internet and engaging in intimate sexual banter with them, sometimes sending them lewd self portraits taken with his BlackBerry.

 

In the video, Mr. Weiner describes himself as a champion of the city’s middle class, and decries rising rents, a paucity of “good jobs with benefits,'’ inadequate schools and overregulated businesses

 

Since he resigned from Congress under intense pressure from Democratic Party leaders in the summer of 2011, Mr. Weiner has opened a strategic consulting firm that allowed him to cash in on his Washington connections.

But he has remained on the sidelines as the city grappled with contentious debates over a living wage requirement, mandatory paid stick leave for workers and a ban on large sugary drinks, inviting inevitable questions about why he is returning to politics now.

His nascent campaign has struggled to attract marquee political strategists, as it has faced the rejection of many potential recruits and been forced to turn to a 30-year-old with little experience in New York as a campaign manager.

But Mr. Weiner’s raw talents, as a tireless political tactician and verbal jouster, are hard to discount, making him a formidable opponent even in light of his troubles.

His political philosophy has always been something of an anomaly in the city’s more liberal Democratic world. He has called for a single-payer health care system and pushed for hybrid taxis even as he has called for tax cuts and voted for the war in Iraq.

 

This time around, he will be missing a longtime calling card: his reputation as an in-the-trenches champion of the boroughs outside of Manhattan. It was an identity that propelled him to a six-term Congressional career representing Brooklyn and Queens.

Last year, though, Mr. Weiner moved from Forest Hills, Queens, to Gramercy Park in Manhattan, where he lives in a four-bedroom luxury apartment with Ms. Abedin and Jordan.