Anthony Weiner has a bet going with his staff about how this article will begin.
He has been profiled so many times, sat through so many television interviews and attempts at creative questions. Hyper-aware of how he comes across and how he wants to come across, he can almost automatically trace where every line on him will lead.
So he has suggestions: Ydanis Rodriguez, the new City Council member from Washington Heights, calling him one of the elders of the Democratic Party when he called with his congratulations a few days after the election. Or, maybe, he could walk over to debate the “tea bag” protesters camped out on the lawn of the Capitol with their “Don’t Tread On Me” flags.
And did he mention that he was the MVP of the Congressional football league? He just happens to have the ball on his desk.
“‘Weiner, who conducted the interview fondling his game ball…’” he said in his best mock-narrator voice.
There are other options: he and House Minority Leader John Boehner eyeing each other and then both quickly looking away as Weiner sat discussing the health care bill in the Rayburn Room, just off the House floor, in the final afternoon of the House debate. Or a repetition of one of his new favorite bits about looking into renting his own satellite truck to make doing all his recent television appearances easier on everyone.
Or, perhaps, that he showed up at the Hilton for Bill Thompson’s election night party an hour and a half early, before just about anyone, to fend off all the obvious questions, almost on auto-pilot, as he smacked on a piece of gum—Was he sorry about dropping out? What did he think of the campaign Thompson had run? Was he going to run in 2013? What did he have to say about all the Democrats who had gathered at Michael Bloomberg’s party down the street? (Answer: “People over there are the ones who like the free hot dogs. Not the Weiners.”)
What Weiner does not want is for the read on him at the end of 2009 to be about what happened next: after lingering around on stage following a short, powerful, but largely overlooked speech—he took the microphone at almost the exact moment that NY1 called the race for Bloomberg—Weiner slowly wandered back down into the crowd.
Weiner had been told that everyone was going to clear the stage ahead of the concession speech, so he had just gotten a head start. But then everyone stayed, the Democratic establishment of the city holding close around Thompson as he brought his farewell home.
What a ridiculously easy image that would make, he joked. Then another joke. Then he stopped for a moment, looked up at the stage, seemed for a split second content where he was. And then he lit off for the front of room, taking the stage and clapping hard.
Days later, leaning back at his desk in his Washington office, the moment was still rattling around in his mind.
“I have to do anything to stop the lede being,” he said, returning to the narrator’s voice, “‘Standing in the back of the room, somewhat forlorn, in a metaphor for 2009’s election…’”
Because believe him or not, believe the others who know him or not, Weiner really does seem at peace with his decision, content with the choice he made. Sure, the final results were closer than most people expected, but still, Thompson did not win. Only in the context of Bloomberg’s record-busting spending does the margin really seem that tiny. He was torn to not be on the campaign trail occasionally, but he would have been torn as well to not have been in Washington these past six months. And anyway, anyone who knows Weiner knows that he is not the most introspective of people—ask him to hit a Republican on an issue, and he fires hard and fast. Ask him to reflect on life, and he tends to come up dry.
But no matter what he does, the reaction always seems to be: Yeah, right.
It started right away on the night of the election, in that flash of a moment when Thompson was almost leading the race. A few New York members watching the election results from Washington circulated a joke about putting their colleague on suicide watch.
“Call the Capitol police,” one of them said, “and have them deploy to every bridge to protect Anthony.”
When Weiner officially dropped out of the mayor’s race at the end of May, standing in front of the Park Slope brownstone where he grew up and where his father’s law office shingle still hangs, he repeated what he had written in his New York Times op-ed that morning: running against Bloomberg, he feared, was going to be more about an avalanche of advertising than a debate of ideas, and there was a huge amount of work to be done in Washington.
Then he said something that a lot of politicians before him have said: he was, instead of running, going to spend more time focused on his personal life and on the job he already had.
But Weiner actually did. He got engaged, and, after endorsing Thompson at the start of the Salute to Israel parade that weekend, bullhorn and Israeli flag in hand, threw himself into what was to have been the dominating debate of the summer, and has become the dominating debate of the year. Weiner may not have written a single line of the health care bill, he may not have had much power over what ultimately got passed, but he has for many people become the public face of health care reform. This is a man who represents a moderate middle class district that stretches from Brighton Beach to Forest Hills, not even a member of the House Progressive Caucus—and is quite sure an invitation will not be forthcoming. (“I’m not ideologically pure enough,” he said.) Yet in debates with everyone from Betsy McCaughey to Maria Bartiromo, he has been Mr. Liberal Progressive of the airwaves, the defender of single payer, Canadian-style public health insurance.
He first got an interest in Medicare-for-all as far back as 2005, after the end of his last campaign. But there was never a chance to do anything about it until just about everything in Washington changed for Weiner: Democrats won the House and Senate, he was given a spot on the powerful Energy & Commerce Committee (which has partial power over health care), Obama moved into the White House and he accrued what is now a decade of seniority—all coming together at the moment when, for the first time in his life in Congress, he was not actively trying to get out of Congress.
But that meant he was a man in search of another campaign.
He started reading more about health care, learning the ins and outs, and internalizing how each part would benefit people in New York. Then he had something which he said “approximated a legislative epiphany”: “not only does single payer have a value politically in that I think it expresses a fairly simple, easy to understand conceptual that makes it easy to sell a big thing,” he said, “but also substantively, it became more and more profoundly obvious to me that it was the right place to be.”
“Then,” as he tells the story, “I looked up from my books and memos and thought, how come no one’s doing this?”
In a debate that was largely taking place on cable television, Weiner knew he could help. The health care overhaul was being put forward without a base, without a constituency. He set out to give it one.
“It was an instance of in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king—no one was really doing very well what I’ve been trying to do,” he said. “Some of it was, I looked up and realized the mother ship wasn’t giving us very good direction, and I’ve got enough seniority, enough understanding of how things work around here to say, ‘You know what, I think I can do this better than they’re doing.’”
Better and faster than almost anyone, Weiner can find both the most politically potent aspects and how to get attention for them. On this, the answer was in Medicare: he would say they were the same and push the Republicans to explain why they supported socialized medicine for seniors but not for everyone else.
At the end of July, he pounced, offering an amendment in committee that would have ended Medicare. It was a ploy, and everyone, himself included, voted against it. But two months after leaving the mayor’s race, Weiner gave his party a talking point which he says got them 10 more points in the opinion polls and got the bill more than one step closer to the president’s desk.
Three weeks later, on a Saturday afternoon in mid-August when as a mayoral candidate he would have been working a street fairs or a civic association, Weiner sensed that the public option was dying.
So he announced that there were 100 Democrats who were going to vote against any health care bill without a public option.
A lot of people were surprised. And, Weiner admitted, with good reason.
“I didn’t have that. I didn’t know if there were 25 of us. I had no idea. But I did recognize that the way this city works, when these things are flagged, someone has to put a number on things—‘this costs us X number,’” he said. “So I said 100.”
He knew his colleagues in the House would scramble rather than verify, and that the press corps would do the same. And sure enough, no one ever did ask him to produce a list.
'“To say I saved the public option is overselling it,” he said. “[But] what it did was drive a whole bunch of reporting around that little factoid.”
Essentially via press release, he had what was probably his most important moment of the debate.
Waiting for the floor speech which the leadership had tapped him to deliver as the debate began to close, Weiner reviewed some of the dire warnings that had been issued in Congress over Medicare in 1965, just a few months before Weiner’s first birthday. Hitting his message, his plan was to read a quote about the horrors that someone like then-Missouri Rep. Durward “Doc” Hall had projected and point out that the member of Congress in that seat today was saying the same thing about the current health bill.
Every few minutes, his staff connected another call to a winner (Republican and Democrat, within his district or not) of one of this year’s Council races. Weiner offered his help, his guidance and an open line. Without any notes in front of them, he personalized each—a thank-you to Lew Fidler for holding the free flu shot service that Weiner’s father had gone to, a marveling at the progress Ydanis Rodriguez (who earned the ultimate Weiner honorific, “my brother from another mother”) had made since they fought the term limits extension together.
Years ago, somewhere in between his first day stuffing calendars into envelopes as a Capitol Hill intern for then-Rep. Chuck Schumer and becoming the would-have-been mayoral front-runner, Weiner read a story about Jimmy Carter writing letters to all the people who had lost state legislature races in Iowa in the years leading up to the Iowa caucuses. At least he thinks it was Jimmy Carter—but maybe not. The point is that Weiner was inspired. To this day, he sends a note to everyone who loses a primary in New York City. These are the district leaders, the activists, the people who power the political process. At their lowest moment, Weiner wants them to know there is a congressman who still cares enough to notice their efforts.
But the problem, if he is looking to translate all this into a 2013 Weiner campaign, may be with the winners. Incoming Comptroller John Liu and Public Advocate Bill de Blasio will be on the streets daily, scoring points off of Bloomberg and getting their names into the local news for the efforts. And if there is one thing that can be said from the results of this year’s Council races, say those already starting to look ahead, it is that the city is growing increasingly diverse, increasingly distant from the white, middle class, Jewish-heavy electorate that just missed putting Weiner into the 2005 run-off.
Not that he is prepared to cede the spotlight.
“I think that my constituents and future voters in any mayoral campaign are going to want to see that I was trying to be constructive,” he said, heading into the Capitol to cast his vote. “And I also see that if you look at the model for people that have come before, anyone who says ‘I’m going to agree with him no matter what he says,’ like the speaker has said, or ‘I’m going to be against him no matter what he does,’ which to some degree was what Mark Green’s posture under Rudy Giuliani—I don’t think either one of them is the right direction to go.”
Ed Koch served nine years in Congress before being elected mayor, John Lindsay only seven. Fiorello LaGuardia served 13, with a gap to serve in World War I. If he does run in 2013, Weiner—who remains the only member of Congress to keep a New York City flag outside of his office in addition to the American and state flags—would arrive at Gracie Mansion with 15 years in Congress. And these next four could give him a chance to get what he never had before: legislative experience. He will get it the Weiner way: in the newspapers, on television and all over Facebook.
And meanwhile, he still has the $4 million he has sitting in his account at the Campaign Finance Board. While everyone else is still paying the bills on the vendors from this year’s race, Weiner has already maxed out for 2013.
“I think it would be overstating it to say that he’s stepped in and had a profound effect,” said Norm Ornstein, a veteran Washington observer who studies Congress at the American Enterprise Institute. “But he has had one at least in countering some of the negative stuff in the debate and trying to move—especially some of the progressive members—in whatever bill emerges and gets 218 votes.”
Weiner has done this in the best way he knows how: on television. While others were drafting the bill, he was holding his own amid “weiner” jokes with Bill Maher and whoever the cable news shows put next to him. Along the way, he has become a Fox News favorite, even in spite of the White House omerta. (“Just because they’re ignoring the highest-rated cable news channel doesn’t mean we have to,” explained one Weiner aide.)
On the day of the health care debate, Weiner did Fox twice—once in the morning, and once in the evening with Rep. Dave Camp.
Weiner does not know Camp well, but he greeted the Michigan Republican like an old friend: “brighter tie, more distinguished looking,” Weiner said, sizing up his sparring partner as they arranged themselves in the shot.
Yes, the cameraman said, but Weiner was the one who was going to be mayor of New York.
“Let’s not rush that,” Weiner said, trying to change the subject.
“I know you want that job,” the cameraman said, wagging his finger at Weiner. Even he will not drop the topic.
“If I was mayor, I wouldn’t get to debate David Camp,” he said, still trying to move on to a new topic.
Camp smiled politely, not really paying attention. Weiner could not resist.
“Dude,” Weiner said to Camp, trying to needle him, “Gracie Mansion has four bedrooms—I would hook you up.”
The camera went live. Prodded by the host, Camp raised what had, in the final push, become a main talking point for the Republicans: the Democratic bill was going to send people to jail if they did not cooperate with the health plan.
Weiner, whose staff already presented him with this and the other arguments Camp had been making in other recent appearances, began to laugh—half sincere, half theatrical.
“If there’s a concern about going to jail,” Weiner said, a smile stretching high into his cheeks, “I’ll make the deal with him: anyone who is thrown in jail, I’ll serve the time for them. That’s how sure I am that that is just the kind of scare tactics that we frequently hear.”
(The Twitter crowd, Weiner and his staff quietly but proudly point out, went wild over this one. So did the Fox host, who asked him for the first jailhouse interview and thanked him at the end for adding a little levity to the discussion. Camp seemed not to fully register what was happening.)
On the walk over, Weiner admitted that he did sometimes wonder why he bothered with these shows. He had already been on Fox once that day, and there was an MSNBC appearance that he had had to cancel that morning, but was still maybe being shifted around. But Weiner has looked at the numbers. He knows the ratings. Not many people were watching Fox’s “Health Care Countdown” special at 6:05 on a Saturday. And almost none of them were in New York.
Still, when NBC called, asking him to hang around for a few minutes to tape a short bit for the local news, he immediately agreed.
Whatever the next issue is—he expects that for him, it will probably be immigration through his seat on the Judiciary Committee or energy issues through his seat on the Energy & Commerce Committee—Weiner believes the role that he played this summer has propelled him to a new position in the job he is likely to hold for at least the next four years.
“I think this has helped me a good deal institutionally,” he said. “And I’m pretty good at this stuff, and I see no reason I’m going to suddenly not be the caffeinated, amped-up Weiner just because health care’s done.”
He encourages anyone who thinks otherwise to check with a member of Congress from outside New York—someone like Dave Loebsack, the Iowa Democrat who almost missed a recorded vote on health care because he was in the back of the room, not paying attention, when Weiner looked up at the count on the board and screamed “One more!”
Not quite Henry Clay, but Weiner did manage to stop the Republicans from derailing the day’s proceedings and get Loebsack to the front to vote.
“There was one Brooklyn-enough guy in the place to stop the gavel from falling,” he said. “One of the reasons why Chuck Schumer kicks ass and takes numbers in the Senate is because the New York way, even when done at medium speed, is a hurricane for these people.”
Through the beginning of the year, Weiner struggled to accept what he knew would happen if he ran against Bloomberg: the mayor would spend millions to define him in people’s minds, and he knew enough about politics to worry that he would never be able to redefine himself.
“I call it the Weiner premium,” he said, jokingly pegging the additional amount of money that the Bloomberg campaign would have needed to defeat him at $61 million.
“They would have had to conclude the deal and actually buy the Post,” he said. “Just having them working all day for them wouldn’t have been enough.”
Instead of letting himself go down as the irresponsible playboy who did favors for foreign models and missed votes to play ice hockey, Weiner is now a man who has a framed photo of him and his fianc'e (no comment on whether a wedding date has been set), Huma Abedin, staring back at him on the edge of his desk. He has built a relationship, though at times combative, with the White House, which he feels secure about professionally because the president, he said, “loves Huma, sees her every day—that protects me.”
Also through his fianc'e, his existing relationship with Hillary Clinton has grown, while at the same time, his efforts on health care have deepened his relationships with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Energy & Commerce Committee chair Henry Waxman.
“I think he’s really found his rhythm, not just in advocating for single payer, but also becoming more outspoken with the administration, in the press and even internally within the Democratic caucus,” said Rep. Steve Israel, the Long Island congressman who himself refocused on Congress after being asked by the White House to drop his plans for a Senate run the week before Weiner left the mayor’s race.
So yes, Weiner got lucky with the health care debate: if he had not suddenly found himself with a lot of time on his hands, if other members of Congress had been more willing to jump into the fray, if the debate had not happened so completely in the media, he might not have had the same opening.
Luck or not, he had a good summer in Congress. Those who know him and Washington expect that to lead to more.
“He’s got several chits to play,” said Marc Dunkelman, a former Weiner chief of staff who is now a vice president at the Democratic Leadership Council. “People owe him a lot and whatever was going to go through the Congress, he was going to have a pretty strong place to negotiate for what he wanted—which was going to be something for New York’s middle class.”
But the thought of this being his future, of Anthony Weiner growing old and gray in Congress as he slowly works his way up the ranks to become a committee chairman by about 2025, maybe 2030 (he is 19th in seniority on the Judiciary Committee, 20th in seniority on the Energy & Commerce Committee) does not quite make sense to a lot of people. He could, maybe have a sub-committee of his own by 2013, and if all goes well for him, be in a stronger position with a Democratic majority and two-term president, but Weiner says he does not know himself how to answer the question of whether he could be a lifer in DC.
He does not, after all, have the schedule of a man eager to be in Washington. Take the closing days of the campaign: Weiner reached out again to help, spending the Saturday morning before polls opened walking Thompson through the Grand Army Plaza greenmarket.' By Monday he was back in Washington. Monday night, he was at an event back in the district, slept at home, voted early the next morning, flew to Washington for votes, flew back to New York to join Thompson at the Hilton and slept at home. The next morning, he was back in DC.
“It was kind of like a week that I would have done if I was actually a candidate,” Weiner said.
And that, in a way, is exactly the point.
“I still don’t think that Anthony’s fully removed himself from ever being mayor,” Crowley said. “He’s just one of those folks that kind of exudes that energy.”
Or as Crowley assessed the situation: “Anthony Weiner, if he wants to be mayor, he’ll be mayor some day.”
Sure enough, his first stop after the health care vote finally happened was the steps of City Hall. He and the rest of the House kicked the bill to the Senate at 11:15 Saturday night, and Sunday at 12 he was back in New York, reading off the top 10 ways he and his staff had determined the bill would help the city: increased coverage, help for small businesses, hospital remaining open. He threw the facts and figures at the print reporters, four television cameras and one radio microphone, complete with three self-aware football references.
He got two questions, perfunctory ones, the kinds that desk editors make their reporters ask. The rest stared back at him, waiting for him to acknowledge the obvious, open the door for them to ask about politics.
He did not. But as the press conference broke up, they gathered around him, each wondering whether someone else would dare. When one did, they all crowded close, desperate for him to just say the one word of remorse, of agony that they were all so sure he was feeling. For all Weiner’s efforts to keep the attention on health care, for all his resistance to engage in the politics, that is all anyone seems to ever want to talk to him about.
“Isn’t it safe to come back to the steps of City Hall?” Weiner joked.
No, they said. Health care was nice and important, but they wanted to talk to him about the mayor’s race.
“Isn’t that race over?” he asked, with mock innocence.
The reporters did not bite.
“The 2013 race isn’t,” one murmured.