Bloomberg on Weiner

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Mayor Bloomberg might want to call his office. Not the one in City Hall, but the one on Lexington Avenue. His Honor, David Seifman reports in the New York Post, has been chiding the press for focusing on Anthony Weiner’s possible entry into the mayor’s race. But when we punched the former congressman’s name into our favorite search engine, the most to-the-point story that came up was a dispatch that ran under the headline “Weiner’s Return May Shake Up NYC Mayoral Race, Pollster Says.” It ran on the mayor’s own newswire, where the editors spared us the mayoral moralizing.

We don’t mind saying that we differ with a number of our tabloid heroes. It strikes us as a logical move for Mr. Weiner to test the waters in respect of a mayoral run. But then, we differed with our tabloid and broadsheet heroes in reckoning that it would be a mistake for Mr. Weiner to resign from the Congress in the first place. We would have preferred that he stay in office and let the voters make a judgment on the seriousness of his lies and sexual infidelities. He might have been able to ride it out. President Kennedy did. President Clinton Did.

The Clintons, as it turned out, were among the first to turn on Mr. Weiner when he got into trouble. We wrote about it in an editorial called “Weiner and the Clintons,” which we issued after the New York Post reported that the Clinton’s were furious at Mr. Weiner, whose wife worked for Secretary of State Clinton. Mrs. Clinton herself was reportedly urging Mr. Weiner to resign. “ “All one can say,” we wrote, “is that for hypocrisy it takes the cake — or at least what is left of the cake after the part that was taken when President Clinton got judgmental about Mr. Weiner.”

At the time a NY1-Marist Poll was reporting that in the 9th Congressional District, which had sent Mr. Weiner to Congress, something like 56% of the registered voters were opposed to him resigning. We speculated that they had sent him to Washington because despite his narcissism and goofiness, they liked his policies and earnestness and passion for politics. We did, too, incidentally, save for the policies. On policy, we are several kilo-parsecs* to his right. But which Democrat has a better policy record than Mr. Weiner?

How Mr. Weiner would fare were he to try to run the gauntlet of the jeering headlines (and the Sun is not going to suggest that any newspaper back off of anything), this is hard to reckon. But Maurice Carroll of the Quinnipiac Poll predicts that Mr. Weiner would be, as the Bloomberg wire characterized it, a “formidable candidate in a crowded New York mayoral field.” Mr. Carroll notes that were Mr. Weiner to enter a primary against the five Democrats already declared, the likelihood would be an inconclusive vote on September 10, followed by a run off.

That, among other things, could put paid Speaker Christine Quinn’s campaign against the New York Police Department, which in and of itself would be worth the price of admission. Not that we ourselves are likely to favor Mr. Weiner. We’re looking for the candidate who will make a campaign for tax cuts, spending cuts, deregulation, school choice, population growth, immigration, and reform of the Health Department and who comprehends the predicament of our religious communities in a season of expanding government. If, in the meantime — and this is not an endorsement — Mr. Weiner can shake up the race, more power to him.

__________

* A single parsec is about 19.2 trillion miles.


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