Hillary Clinton, fresh off her defeat by Donald J. Trump, is said to be considering a comeback via a run for mayor of New York City this very year. Or at least some powerful New York Democrats who can’t stand current Democratic mayor Bill de Blasio—thanks partly to the dirtier, more disorderly public spaces that are now the order of the day under live-and-let-public-urinators-live de Blasio—are eager for Clinton to take him on in the primary where he will seek a second term. And since 79 percent of Gothamites voted for Hillary in November, why not? Trump-hating, Hillary-loving New York Times columnist Frank Bruni is already salivating:
But if I were Hillary Clinton and I were the least bit superstitious—and who isn’t?—I’d start thinking about the last person who decided to stage a comeback from a stinging political blow by running for mayor and taking on Bill de Blasio.
That person would be Anthony Weiner. On a recent plane flight I switched on Weiner, the 2016 documentary that chronicled his 2013 mayoral campaign two years after his abrupt resignation from the Brooklyn-based congressional seat he had occupied for more than a decade. The resignation followed revelations that Weiner had texted selfies of his shirtless torso, and more frequently, of his underpants while he was wearing them, to a range of females—and had also not been exactly honest when confronted with the evidence. Then, in July 2013, just after the polls showed him siphoning off 40 percent of likely voters from his rivals, another sexting relationship surfaced involving a 22-year-old woman and Weiner using the moniker “Carlos Danger.” The film ended after Weiner’s ignominious defeat in the 2013 mayoral primary but, sadly, before the third sexting episode that proved to be his coup de grace in 2016: that selfie of his underpants with him in them taken while his 4-year-old son lay sleeping next to his leg.
I didn’t have earphones with me, so I had to watch Weiner without the sound, but the documentary was so well-edited visually that I could easily follow—and hoot at—the witty New York Post headlines (“Obama Beats Weiner”) and the photos of Weiner’s bulging boxer briefs that were a staple for a while on Stephen Colbert and Bill Maher. But having to watch Weiner as a silent movie focused me on a visual image that appeared in nearly every frame: Huma Abedin, Weiner’s now-estranged wife. It wasn’t just the reminder of FBI director James Comey’s revelation two weeks before the 2016 presidential vote, that his agency, investigating sexual improprieties involving Weiner and a 15-year-old girl, found some of Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails on a computer in the apartment that he and Abedin had shared—a revelation that might have helped sink Clinton’s prospects.
It was more that there she was, always: the elegant but never really happy-looking Huma trailing her husband doggedly at nearly every 2013 campaign venue as he kissed ethnic babies, twirled a rainbow flag in an LGBT parade, and delivered pep talks to his adoring young staffers. Just in the way that the elegant but never really happy-looking Huma, as Hillary’s aide and confidante, trailed her boss doggedly at nearly every campaign venue in 2016. There was something eerie about this disastrous 2013 prefiguring of 2016’s disastrous (for Hillary) defeat.
Karl Marx said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce. In Weiner’s case his attempted comeback as a New York City mayoral candidate was more like first as farce. Does that mean that if Hillary tries to repeat that history, the outcome might be . . . . well, tragic? If I were Hillary Clinton, I’d think about that.
