Back in 2009, in the aftermath of Bill Thompson’s shocking near victory for Mayor, I pretty much made the case for Anthony Weiner:
“…there is a lot of dissatisfaction from other quarters, not all of them liberal. To try to carve out a middle class existence in a City like New York is a constant battle in which residents often feel besieged by forces seemingly intent upon driving them to embark upon a suburban existence. Some of those forces are beyond the realm of government to even impact upon. But some, like the multiple and manifold forms of taxation by summons, are enough to drive even the City’s most ardent lovers into the arms of another.
I hate Rudy Giuliani liker poison, but he is, in living memory, the Mayor of New York who best understood this phenomena. In this regard, Bloomberg is the Mayor who most does not get it. It is why even worthy proposals of his like Congestion Pricing so drive middle class outer borough New Yorkers out of their minds.
There is out there a great seething resentment, not all of it rational, but much of it quite on the mark, for the sort of clueless lack of concern over this legitimate frustration. And for many, Bloomberg is its personification. In fact, the perception that there is nothing to be done about Bloomberg only fuels the fury of those so afflicted. I think the secret of Thompson’s good showing was, that unlike the local press, Thompson understood all this extremely well.
The problem was that this phenomenon was strongest in our local equivalent of the “red states,” and as Barack Obama has discovered, the fact that people in places like Arkansas and Louisiana have large populations in need of health insurance does not make those people more likely to support a black man who may actually be sensitive to their concerns. Bill Thompson did far better in our local “red states” than anyone expected, but there was a point which he could not get beyond.
Perhaps the winner needed to be a Weiner.”
As I later noted, Weiner got this better than any other potential Democratic Mayoral candidate.
And, for those of us who this message speaks to, the loss of Weiner meant that we lost our best spokesman.
But, as I also noted, there was another side of Weiner:
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