When Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer announced they were running for two of this city’s most important positions — mayor and comptroller — they confirmed themselves to be men beyond embarrassment. Unfortunately, their presence in these races is making New York the punchline of a national dirty joke. We call on these men to end their campaigns.
Let’s start with Weiner. With each day we have another shift in his account of the online sexting that two years ago forced him to resign from Congress. If it’s not outrageous enough that a man who transmits photos of his genitals to women he’s never met believes himself fit to serve as New York’s mayor, the falsehoods and dissembling that have characterized his explanations should resolve that question in favor of his immediate departure.
These fundamental questions of honesty, moreover, now also extend to his wife, Huma, who colluded in selling to New Yorkers what turned out to be a false story about a man who had learned his lesson. Plainly he hadn’t.
Then there’s Spitzer, the self-professed “steamroller.” If New Yorkers would be ill-served to have a mayor who has proved he can’t control himself, what about a politician whose career suggests he never held a power he didn’t abuse, or a double standard he didn’t embrace?
Right now Spitzer is trying to move us beyond his “mistakes” by boasting how much the city’s business community hates him — and how that’s a good thing. The message here: They’ll get theirs as soon as Eliot gets his hands on power again. What would it mean for New York to have in office a man who has every personal incentive to make people forget about his hooker scandal by targeting others for attack?
Beyond the respective narcissism of these two men, the larger issue is what their candidacies are doing to this election. At stake this year are policy decisions that will determine whether we will keep our streets safe, educate our children and have a government that encourages enterprise and lives within its means.
But instead of debating these issues, we are discussing call girls and crotch shots. Thus too are we treated to the spectacle of Spitzer parsing out the difference between his sex scandal and Weiner’s. Not to mention the way each man is effectively suggesting the sex scandals that forced their earlier ousters have made them more suited for office, not less.
The encouraging news is that more and more political leaders have realized the damage having these men in the race inflicts — on the city, on the Democratic Party, on our politics. For example, two former Democratic state party chairs, Denny Farrell and Judith Hope, suggested it would be “wise” for Spitzer and Weiner to drop out.
We’d like to think that these men would simply spare the New York they claim to love the indignity of their campaigns and withdraw. The available evidence, alas, suggests that if they had that regard they never would have entered. So if they are going to go, they will likely need to be pushed.