What About 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
NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

Anthony Weiner telephoned right after Labor Day, and we were delighted to return his call. We’ve always rather liked the congressman and his plucky sallies on behalf of Israel, his barbs at the United Nations, and his willingness to speak up for Jewish undergraduates at Columbia University. It turned out that Mr. Weiner was calling to see whether he could send us any information that might help us see our way to endorsing him in the primary on Tuesday. He said he believes he’ll make it into the runoff and then beat the former president of the Bronx, Fernando Ferrer, setting himself up for a victory in November.


It hasn’t escaped our notice that the congressman has made a point to distinguish himself from the socialist tendencies of some of his fellow Democrats in the primary. He is promising a tax cut to all New Yorkers making less than $150,000 a year and criticizes his leading opponent, Mr. Ferrer, for backing a tax increase. Unlike Mr. Ferrer, Mr. Weiner reckons Mayor Giuliani was a better mayor than Mayor Bloomberg. “We need to cut taxes on the middle class, reform government by cutting out waste,” Mr. Weiner said in a recent appearance on New York 1.


But for all Mr. Weiner’s centrist talk, we’re skeptical. The more one hears from Mr. Weiner, the more his centrism appears based more on whim than on deep-seated belief. Clearly he doesn’t credit the supply-side approach, or he wouldn’t be proposing a compensating tax increase on New Yorkers making more than $1 million a year. Wealthy New Yorkers already pay far, far more than their share of the city’s staggeringly high tax burden and in New York State are sharply overtaxed compared to such competing cities as Palm Beach, Fla., and Greenwich, Conn. Why did the congressman vote against virtually all of President Bush’s tax cuts?


If Mr. Weiner genuinely believes in taking the Democratic Party in a free-market direction, why is he an implacable opponent of allowing Wal-Mart to open in New York and offer jobs to people who may want to work there and low-cost merchandise to New Yorkers who may want to shop there? If he’s such a national security hawk, why, under criticism in the primary, has he withered from his vote favoring the war in Iraq? Talk about your summer soldiers. He didn’t last much longer than the first robin of spring.


And if Mr. Weiner is a Giuliani Democrat, why did he answer in a debate that he has never voted for a non-Democrat? The voters Mr. Weiner is trying to reach know that Giuliani Democrats didn’t vote for Ruth Messinger. These are the kinds of questions that drain his credibility, even though he may be a wonderful individual personally and we enjoyed enormously his visit to the editorial rooms of the Sun.


As we did our encounters, during the past several years, with the president of Manhattan, C. Virginia Fields, who is an exceptionally gracious and admirable public official; Mr. Ferrer, who has made an earnest struggle; and the speaker, Gifford Miller, who has been confronting some tough ethical questions in the current campaign. Of the Democrats, Mr. Weiner has the views closest to our own. But for all that and his humor and repartee, we’re going to hang back on September 13 and see how the Republican nominee carries the issues toward election day.

NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

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.


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