It’s not often that a mayoral race draws national attention, but when one of the candidates is in the race to make a comeback after tweeting lewd photographs of himself to a woman who was not his wife, things are a little different.
Yes, we’re talking about Anthony Weiner.
Weiner officially announced his campaign via Youtube around midnight on Tuesday, drawing speculation that the announcement was strategically timed to prevent New York City tabloids from pun-laden headlines about his announcement.
Since the big reveal, things haven’t exactly been smooth sailing. If you happened to log onto Weiner's campaign website before this afternoon, you might have noticed that the imagery behind Weiner's campaign logo featured a skyline. Picturesque? Yes. The problem was, it was the Pittsbugh skyline. The error was fixed but the screenshots live on.
That aside, even the candidate acknowledges that there’s no way to avoid having his campaign double as an ongoing apology tour. “I have apologized many, many times to my wife, and frankly I know that part of this process is going to be doing a lot of apologizing,” he said in an interview with WNYC.
Weiner did not rule out the possible existence of additional snapshots like the ones that led to his resignation from Congress.
“If reporters want to go and try to find more–I can’t say whether they’ll be able to find another picture or another person who may want to come out on their own,” he told WNYC.
Then there’s the question of how other prominent politicians with ties to the candidate and New York in general are reacting to Weiner’s mayoral bid.
Speaking with reporters in Buffalo yesterday, a fellow Democrat, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, started out coy. “None. No reaction. None. Look, my face didn't move. No reaction." By day’s end however, Cuomo had shifted gears and said that it would be “shame on us” for New Yorkers if Weiner were elected.
There’s was initial speculation about whether Bill and Hillary Clinton will show support for Anthony Weiner, given their close ties to Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin. Abedin served as a close aide to Hillary Clinton during her stint as Secretary of State. Speculation ended when a spokesman for Hillary Clinton provided a statement to Politico. “Secretary Clinton knows all of the candidates, she has worked with many of them, and is close with many of them, so won’t be weighing in one way or the other,” said spokesman Nick Merrill.
We’re just a few weeks out from the successful comeback of Republican Mark Sanford. Just four years after his fabricated hike on the Appalachian Trail that turned out to be an extramarital affair in Argentina, the former South Carolina governor won a congressional race in South Carolina. Weiner says he's not looking to follow in Sanford's footsteps.
"I don't look at my race through the lens of anyone else's experience," Weiner told Talking Points Memo. "Believe me, mine is unique enough."