Just a year after resigning in disgrace from Congress, former U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner is reportedly considering running for mayor.
While his wife was pregnant, Weiner was tweeting lewd pictures of himself to a college student and other women. There was nothing illegal about what he was doing, but it called into question his sense of ethics.
In what sounded like a plot from a sitcom, he intended to send an X-rated picture of his genitals to a 21-year-old Seattle journalism student in a private message. Instead, he made a mistake and it went out to 45,000 people, then lied about it.
Weiner remains married to Huma Abedin, a senior aide to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He is lucky. Other women might have shown him the door.
But Weiner cannot expect his former constituents to be that forgiving. Imagine “Mayor Weiner” on Letterman and Leno.
The New York Post reported that Weiner, 47, has $4.5 million in his campaign war chest and that a public match expires after the 2013 election.
Weiner told NYC Radio that he has “regrets” and added that he “paid a very high price.” He also has “great regrets for the people I’ve let down.”
Weiner should run for public advocate. Most voters don’t know who the advocate is or what he does.
If he wants to get back into public life, he should start at the bottom.
Stop and Think
From the pulpit of the AME cathedral in Jamaica, Mayor Michael Bloomberg took on the New York Civil Liberties Union, the NRA and other critics of the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk campaign.
NYCLU claims stop-and-frisk is unjust because 80 percent of the nearly 685,000 people stopped last year were minorities.
The mayor and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly believe the critics are wrong. They note blood continues to flow from gun-related violence in city communities.
The stop-and-frisks are humiliating, but watching an innocent child die or be dragged off to a hospital because he or she got hit by a stray bullet fired in a gang war is worse.
Hopefully, Kelly can meet with community leaders to find a way to make stop-and-frisk more acceptable without giving up on the war on guns.
