Miller Attacks Weiner’s Voting Record
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 once-tame interactions among the four Democrats running for mayor have become feistier.
With less than two weeks until the party primary, the speaker of the City Council, Gifford Miller, has begun a new phase of intense attacks on Rep. Anthony Weiner, the candidate political experts said poses the greatest competition for Mr. Miller’s political base.
For the second consecutive day, the Miller campaign blasted Mr. Weiner’s voting record, this time through a statement issued by e-mail yesterday on behalf of the treasurer of the Tenant Political Action Committee, which endorsed the council speaker. A day after the Miller camp criticized Mr. Weiner’s stance on the Iraq war, the tenants’ PAC statement, by Michael McKee, attacked Mr. Weiner for voting for “one of the most aggressively anti-tenant bills” in city history when the congressman was a member of the City Council in 1994. The statement questioned the sincerity of his current promises to protect tenants’ rights and accused Mr. Weiner of “hypocrisy.”
A spokesman for the Weiner campaign, Anson Kaye, said Mr. Weiner’s vote to deregulate apartments renting for $2,000 or more a month was not anti-tenant, but a way to protect the middle class.
“It’s not surprising when candidates who are unable to gain traction in the polls start launching desperate political attacks on other candidates,” he said.
Officials at the Miller campaign said voters deserved to know that the congressman’s voting record was inconsistent with his promises.
***
The Democratic mayoral candidate with the smallest campaign budget, C. Virginia Fields, launched her first television commercial yesterday. The commercial is a montage of black-and-white still shots of Ms. Fields as a teenager in the 1960s during civil rights protests in her hometown of Birmingham, Ala., and more current shots with children and seniors in New York. The 30-second spot will begin airing today and will continue running until the September 13 primary, according to the Fields campaign.
The Manhattan president is the last of the four contenders for the nomination to begin running commercials. Her campaign has been running radio spots until now.
Ms. Fields’s popularity in the public opinion polls has decreased slightly, but she is still in a statistical dead heat for second place behind front-runner Fernando Ferrer.
Her campaign spokeswoman, Kirsten Powers, would not say how much the commercial cost. She said only that it would start on cable and move to the broadcast stations.
***
Seizing on a census report released Tuesday that showed an increase in the poverty rate across the five boroughs, Rep. Anthony Weiner unveiled yesterday his plan to end indigence in the city.
The centerpiece of the Brooklyn-Queens congressman’s proposal was the elimination of fingerprinting safeguards to ensure the authenticity of food-stamp claimants. At a press conference outside the Holy Apostle Church in Chelsea, Mr. Weiner said 390,220 fewer New Yorkers were enrolled in the city’s food-stamp program than in 1995. He bemoaned the reduced number of city residents receiving publicly subsidized nutrition, attributing the decline in food-stamp recipients to the burden associated with fingerprinting requirements.
“Fingerprinting isn’t eliminating fraud,” Mr. Weiner said. “Fingerprinting is being punitive. … You know, we don’t fingerprint executives of Halliburton when they want to get a contract with the government.” He declined to identify specific alternative measures he would implement to ensure food-stamp recipients’ legitimacy.
Most of Mr. Weiner’s proposals to eliminate poverty relied on using federal money to subsidize food, housing, and health care for low-income New Yorkers. One element of his platform, helping small businesses create more jobs, sought to improve conditions for New York’s poor by enabling them to earn more money on their own. Beyond calling for greater access to the food-stamp program – which the congressman labeled “the most effective way to lift children up out of poverty” – Mr. Weiner’s “integrated approach to fighting poverty” consisted mostly of policy proposals already trotted out by the congressman over the course of his campaign.
During a question session with reporters, Mr. Weiner also expressed enthusiasm about a New York Times poll showing him in second place in the Democratic mayoral primary contest.
“I’m now in a runoff,” Mr. Weiner said. “I’m still the least known of the candidates, and I’m in second place – the only one who’s moving up in all of these polls.”
Addressing a question that has dogged mayoral candidates at their appearances across the city this week, the congressman also praised the anti-war protester Cindy Sheehan as “the voice in this country for a lot of us who believe that there isn’t a plan, that the president has not shown leadership.”