BAD CALL: Huma Abedin, in Chelsea yesterday, has not been honest with her sympathetic public. (David McGlynn)
Our would-be Mayor Carlos Danger has done it again.
After sitting for lengthy, sympathetic profiles with The New York Times magazine, New York and People — where he declared, “I feel like a different person” — serial online sexter Anthony Weiner and his wife, Huma Abedin, held a joint press conference in which they admitted Weiner, who’d been ahead of all Democratic contenders in the polls, was up to his old tricks.
When did New Yorkers at large become the equivalent of the doormat wife? Is this how we see ourselves — the collective masochist in Anthony Weiner’s endless psycho-sexual melodramas? It’s one thing to believe sexual infidelity has no bearing on the ability to govern — the city had a rather grown-up reaction to then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s cheating, which paid off in a great mayor — but it’s another to believe that this is all that’s wrong with Weiner and his compatriot in shamelessness, Eliot Spitzer.
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Spitzer is a hypocrite of the highest order, a self-styled paragon of moral rectitude who patronized prostitutes. Now he wants to be comptroller — yet won’t release his tax filings. How dare we, the mere electorate, ask? Isn’t it enough that someone of his intellect and prominence deigns to serve in such a lowly, unglamorous job? It’s not Spitzer’s sexual proclivities that are at issue; it’s the rampant sense of entitlement. His wife, Silda, who stood by his side as he announced his resignation, has made it clear that she’d rather her estranged husband not run. Clearly, that’s too much to ask.
Weiner, meanwhile, is a spectacularly unaccomplished politician who did nothing in Congress other than alienate his staffers and colleagues. He’s spent months selling this redemption narrative — full of tears and therapy and a martyred wife — while continuing to solicit at least one other young woman online, promising to hook her up with a job at Politico and a condo in Chicago in trade for a “hard delete” of their exchanges.
And still, voters wonder?
This used to be a city where cynicism, skepticism and a general philosophy of F-you-ness kept even the most famous, accomplished arrivistes on edge. What happened? Is it our post-Oprah culture, where admitting you did something wrong — even only after getting caught — equals automatic forgiveness? Or have we lost our edge in going from lawlessness and race riots to debates over cigarette smoking and Citibikes? When did New Yorkers develop such low self-esteem that Anthony Weiner seems like the mayor we deserve? `
Weiner was quoted in last week’s New York magazine as saying that his personal and political reformation came about only when he “stopped lying.” When exactly was that? He also mocked a publishing house that had approached him about writing a memoir: “They think it has to have some plotline, like my rise, my fall, how I bottom out, feel all this remorse, have an epiphany, and then come back,” he said, as if he had far too much integrity to ever try that line. “I’m supposed to be sorry, sorry in this way you’re supposed to be sorry . . . but I don’t know if it’s hitting me like that.” It was yet another look into Weiner’s unstoppable self-destructiveness: He admitted to a journalist that he felt no remorse.
It’s also time to declare a moratorium on the line that Huma Abedin is the smartest, shrewdest, most level-headed and glamorous asset the Democratic Party has, and if she’s OK with Anthony, we should be, too. Clearly, there is something very wrong with Abedin — whether it’s simply that she shares her husband’s vaulting ambition or that she has a pathological need to be publicly humiliated, something’s up. When The New York Times is calling for you to take your sad assemblage of sexual compulsions out the door, you should consider that a wake-up call. Silda may have stood by Eliot, but even she never opened her mouth in his defense.
Abedin took the good-wife act one step further at Tuesday’s press conference, admitting her collusion in this new lie: “We discussed all of this before Anthony decided to run for mayor,” she said. So clearly, as Abedin sat for these joint interviews in which Weiner claimed to be a changed man, she knew that wasn’t the truth, and was happy to lie to a public that had been nothing but sympathetic toward poor, brilliant Huma, saddled with such a dud. Perhaps they’re a better match than we knew.
“So what I really want to say,” Abedin continued, “is I love him, I have forgiven him, I believe in him, and as we have said from the beginning, we are moving forward.”
How telling that Abedin didn’t acknowledge another harsh truth: It’s the New York electorate that decides how far — not her, not Anthony, and certainly not Carlos Danger.