Backfall

Doris Day, uncredited and undated.

The last time Anthony Weiner started becoming a little bit famous, toward what was meant to be his reelection to Congress, it was as a kind of gritty northeastern industrial-grade Alan Grayson figure, a speaker of truth to power in no uncertain terms, and some of us [jump]
who should perhaps have known better (the writer blushingly refers to himself) were possibly a little more enthusiastic than he strictly deserved.

Because just as Oscar Levant used to say he remembered Doris Day back before she became a virgin, in the same way we had been aware of Weiner before he became a progressive, when he was a much less promising old Queens politicus, with a certain animus against Manhattan and not so much ability to explain where he stood beyond fluster and bluff.

It is that Anthony Weiner  that is resurfacing in the mayoral campaign, especially at yesterday's education function, where he announced that he would refuse to provide special funding for public school arts instruction.

Weiner also defended his previous call to make it easier to remove disruptive students from classrooms, and refused to ban co-locations of charter schools without community approval. Weiner also said he wanted to "reward" teachers who took jobs in more challenging schools.

These are all regressive policies associated with Mayor Bloomberg and the old chancellor Klein, and parents and teachers really hate them. If he can't distinguish himself from Bloomberg in education policy (all the other Democrats can, even the most cringily Bloombergian) then he should really just wave his dick around the room for old times' sake and go back home.

Ah, yes, now we remember: it was Weiner's first campaign, for City Council, in 1991:

It was at this point that Weiner’s campaign decided to blanket the district with leaflets attacking his opponents. But these were no ordinary campaign attacks: They played the race card, and at a very sensitive time. They were also anonymous. 

Just weeks earlier, the Crown Heights riot — a deadly, days-long affair that brought to the surface long-standing tension between the area’s black and Jewish populations — had played out a few miles away from the 48th District. The episode had gripped all of New York and had been national news. It was just days after order had been restored that Weiner’s campaign distributed its anonymous leaflets, which linked Cohen — whose voters he was targeting in particular — to Jesse Jackson and David Dinkins, who was then New York’s mayor.... The leaflets urged voters to “just say no” to the “Jackson-Dinkins agenda” that Cohen supposedly represented. At City Hall, Dinkins held up the flier and branded it “hateful.”

It was worse than hateful, as Talleyrand might have said; it was Nixonian. So that's my Weiner problem. What's yours?

From Lattaland.