Well, here comes Anthony — God save us all.
Two polls out this week, while drawing modestly different pictures, demonstrate that former Rep. Anthony Weiner is going to be a big — maybe deciding — factor in this year’s mayoral election.
Obviously, this is a town where voters will put up with anything.
How else to explain yesterday’s Quinnipiac University poll, showing Weiner in a flat-footed mayoral primary tie — with City Council Speaker Christine Quinn dropping and former comptroller Bill Thompson moving up slightly in the Democratic contest?
How else to explain Tuesday’s Marist College survey, which gave Weiner a clear lead in that contest?
Polls are just benchmarks, of course, and they are propelled by events. But principles are supposed to endure.
So is it being too judgmental — to be sure, that most damning of modern mortal sins — to suggest that some conduct is so disreputable, so dishonorable, so disqualifying of public trust that some transgressors should just go away? And stay there?
Guess not. Consider:
* Tony Weiner is a pervert. No other word fairly describes what he did — and if he had done it in public, instead of using a digital camera, he would have been tossed in jail.
Ah, you say. But he didn’t do it in public — the e-flashing was confined to willing partners, and so what if at least one of them supposedly was under the legal age for consent to such a thing?
* But then came the lying — the reflexive, upon-my-very-soul denials of ever having done such a thing, of even being capable of doing such a thing. And, in turn, the last refuge of the cyber-scoundrel: “I was hacked!” declared Weiner, to great mirth and amusement.
Now he’s back, and what explains it?
A distressingly weak Democratic ticket, for one thing — plus the near-total irrelevance of the Republicans. In such a vacuum, malign buffoons like Anthony Weiner prosper.
The media, for another. Spackling over the former congressman’s abiding character flaws has done wonders to turn an otherwise desultory primary into a moderately interesting contest. Ratings rule!
Then there is ideology. It is impossible to imagine a moderate Republican getting away with the cyber-flashing, let alone the lying, and then glibly sliding into a commanding presence in a mayoral primary. The political culture just wouldn’t stand for it.
But that same culture has permitted Democratic Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver to get clean away with succoring serial sexual predators like fellow Democrat Vito Lopez for decades — and, indeed, it’s not at all clear that the execrable Lopez won’t win a seat on the City Council this year.
Which, in the end, pretty much explains it all.
Silver and Lopez, for all their current differences, are accomplished dispensers of free stuff — the speaker and his ex-colleague together constructing a towering patronage palace in Brooklyn, and Lopez’s delighted constituents raking it all in.
And though Weiner may be a sociopath, he is also a clever, experienced politician with a kitbag of catch phrases sure to set outer-borough antennae to twitching.
While other Democrats condemn New York as economically and socially bifurcated — the “two cities” meme is meant to stimulate racial- and class-driven demands for free stuff, because that sort of ugliness generates votes — Weiner is the self-appointed guardian of the middle-class. If you doubt it, just listen: The words “middle-class” whiz out of his mouth like machine-gun bullets.
He may now be living on a dubious income stream in a $12,000-plus-per-month Manhattan rental, but his old constituents (and kindred souls all around town) want their free stuff, too.
And Anthony means to oblige. Which helps explain his current standing in the polls.
Again, those polls will move. But as was noted here in April, nobody ever went broke underestimating the self-interested tolerance of the New York electorate.
Tony Weiner, it appears, least of all