Anthony Weiner and How the Democrats Can Do Better

If you’ve been following the New York City mayoral elections, you’ll know that the Democrats are currently in a state of pandemonium.  Their presumed frontrunner, Christine Quinn, has been eviscerated by the press, and one of her chief opponents, Bill Thompson, can’t seem to find any sort of fire with the electorate, despite him almost beating Mayor Bloomberg in 2009.  The city, one of the country’s most liberal, hasn’t elected a Democrat since David Dinkins in 1989.  This year was supposed to be a cakewalk for the Democrats, and now they’re starting to get nervous.  As a result, polls are indicating that they may be about to do something rash, to which I say please, please don’t.  Don’t nominate Anthony Weiner to be our nominee.

For those of you who don’t remember (and I doubt there are many of you who don’t remember as it happened fairly recently), Anthony Weiner was a Brooklyn-born congressman whom many assumed would eventually become mayor.  In fact, 2013 was gearing up to be the year he would finally make the plunge.  He was Chuck Schumer’s protégé, and his wife was adored by the Clintons.  With the presumed support of these political power brokers, it seemed difficult to comprehend that he would lose.

Then, of course, came the Twitter scandal.  Weiner, whether out of hubris or stupidity or self-sabotage, accidentally tweeted a semi-pornographic photo of his crotch to a 21-year-old woman that he thought was private, but in fact was public.  Being that you can’t actually delete anything from Twitter if you’re a famous person, the photos were soon seen on Andrew Breitbart’s conservative blog, and after days of allegations, Weiner admitted that the picture was of him and eventually resigned from Congress on June 16, 2011.

Now, it’s a little over two years after that incident, and the Democrats, desperate for someone to coalesce around after a harsh primary, are starting to give Weiner, easily the best known candidate in the race, a second look, and I say STOP.

I know that in real life, people deserve second chances, and I'm totally fine with that.  We forgive our friends and family for the mistakes that they make, and we hope that we can get the same in return.

However...I don't think it's necessarily something we automatically have to do with our politicians.  I know that this sounds a bit hypocritical coming from someone who loves, say, Bill Clinton, but he was a sitting president, and has done far more good for this country than most any other politician in recent memory.  There is an abundance of Democratic candidates in the New York environment, why do we need Rep. Weiner?

The reality is that Weiner, while a once up-and-coming politician, isn't a former president or a once-in-a-generation politician that the party can't really waste like Clinton.  While I don't want us to get to be the party of the pious or the non-forgiving, we also don't need to promote Weiner just a couple of years after his fall from grace after he sent suggestive and potentially explicit photos of himself to women considerably younger than him and who were not his wife.  We can do better as a party than this man.  I am personally fine with what politicians do in private, and quite frankly would have been fine with him staying in office and then letting his constituents decide whether he was fit for office or not, but I draw the line at rewarding them with a nomination to a major political position and stepping ground (how many positions in country are as visible to the national electorate as being Mayor of New York?) after embarrassing the party and losing the seat as a result of his scandal and resignation (the Democrats went on to lose the special election for Rep. Weiner's seat, one of the only times in recent memory where the GOP picked up a seat as a result of a Democrat resigning). His candidacy, in fact, puts into play the seat that the Democrats have not been able to hold for decades, and if we nominate him, we're in the same position the GOP was with Mark Sanford in the special election-still the favorite, but we'll have to spend money and man-power to push a candidate in a race that should be a cakewalk.

The people of New York City have a decision to make, therefore, and hopefully will be smart about it.  People deserve second chances, but politicians don't necessarily deserve them, particularly when that second chance puts at stake an important political office in the general election (some might say that sounds cynical, I'm calling it pragmatic).  If the Democrats of New York truly feel that Anthony Weiner, despite his past abuse of the public's confidence, deserves a second shot at public life despite it making the general that much more competitive, then by all means vote for him.  However, I think that someone with such bad judgment after being given a golden career opportunity in the House, shouldn't get a second chance when we have a bevy of up-and-coming candidates who haven't made his mistakes.