JONATHAN CHAIT JUNE 2, 2011
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The best starting point for understanding the bizarre controversy surrounding Anthony Weiner is this great 2001 Vanity Fair story about the culture of interns and exploitative sex on Capitol Hill:
The women are heckled as they enter. “Tell us your name and where you are from,” says one of the men. As if on a game show the women comply, one by one. When Caroline says she is an intern, the largest of the group, a white-haired man with a big belly and big laugh, roars, “We’re afraid of interns.” He throws his knife at a lean man named Mike, at the other end of the table. Mike is unamused. He threatens to throw it back. Another guy, rotund and jolly-faced, stands up and does an impression of Marlon Brando doing Don Corleone. The others think it’s hysterical.
Diana whispers that there is no way they can be congressmen. She figures they are businessmen. She wonders how she is going to get out.
They are congressmen—although at first they pretend not to be. One, the youngest, with a tiny goatee, introduces himself as Anthony, an auto-parts salesman. The others call him “the Jewish kid” and make fun of his beard. Their real names and states are as follows: the auto-parts salesman is Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.); the lean Mike is Michael Capuano (D-Mass.); the jolly guy who imitated Brando is John Larson (D-Conn.); the man who was worried about interns is Robert Brady (D-Pa.). ...
The next day, New York’s Anthony Weiner finds the time to hunt down Diana’s E-mail address. He writes that he hopes they might meet again. Diana is overwhelmed that he’s managed to think of her on a day that must be heavy with import and emotional intensity. Last night he mentioned that he’d be going to Manhattan to inspect the World Trade Center wreckage with the president. They’d be traveling together on Air Force One.
Caroline records: “Went for lunch with Diana. Anthony Weiner has emailed her and she didn’t know he was a member of Congress. She died when I showed her his card! It was so funny!! I think she likes him, but she doesn’t want to admit it. In fact, I know she likes him ’cos she’s been on his website this afternoon looking at the photo gallery.”
A week later, two nights before Caroline will leave for England, the girls return to the Capital Grille. Now they know the drill, and they capture their prey with ease. “Three more congressmen,” Diana gloats. “Republicans—got their cards and everything.”
She has left Anthony Weiner dangling, after he E-mailed her that she should come and visit his office “in person.” “I thought that was kind of cheesy,” sniffs Diana.
Now here is the tricky part. Understanding Weiner's character makes it very easy to believe that he would tweet a lewd photo to a young woman. On the other hand, it also makes it easy to believe he didn't tweet the photo but is refusing to explain himself because he did some other embarrassing or unethical act. The upshot is that the allegation against him seems a little sketchy, but it's hard to generate much sympathy for the man.
13 comments
I have never liked Anthony Weiner. Can we ship him across the aisle?
- liberalref
June 2, 2011 at 11:13am
This whole item is entirely unsubstantiated rumor and smells more like something that would appear on fox news. First, Weiner is cited via Vanity Fair as being part of a group of which some may have been behaving inappropriately (have you, JC, never been in a locker room where some of your football buddies were doing something in bad taste?). Then we find that Weiner has contacted one intern and asked her to visit. Arguably a little skeezy, though he would have been youngish back in 2001, and single. It's hardly proven here that the approach was a sexual one, and in any case opinions may differ as to the skeeziness of a bachelor congressman dating an intern (not his own intern). The arugment is then bolstered by evidence that the intern was attracted to him too, which would seem to lessen the skeeziness quotient if anything. Then, having created a very small amount of smoke from very little hard data (remember, VF has every financial incentive to sex up its stories - who's going to read "Congressmen Behaving Well"?), we finish with a "where there's smoke there's fire" argument. Really, somebody has been reading the other team's playbook.
- boyski
June 2, 2011 at 11:15am
I carry no brief for AW by the way: not my rep, never met him, etc. But I have great trouble believing he would do something that dumb in this cultural moment. Consider: he's clearly intelligent and media savvy, he works in an institution which just lost Chris Lee (from the same state!) due to the famous shirtless photo, he's from NYC and lives in DC (hardly media backwaters), he's well versed in social media, he knows Jon Stewart, ... Skeezy or not, how could any reasonably intelligent, non-drunken person think it was safe to send a pants-less photo right after what happened to Lee?
- boyski
June 2, 2011 at 11:21am
Isn't he married to Hillarylander Huma Abidin? Can't be too popular in Foggy Bottom.
- sandiego
June 2, 2011 at 11:22am
JC 1, boy, 0.
- liberalref
June 2, 2011 at 11:23am
Wow. It would have been extremely dumb for a sitting president to get sucked off in the Oval Office by a young intern while he was conducting business on the phone, so therefore, it never happened. The naivete out here is just astonishing. Anthony Wiener is yoked to Huma Abedin.
- liberalref
June 2, 2011 at 11:35am
My bet is that Weiner did something, somewhere, that seemed funny at the time but is (probably mildly) tasteless. Maybe the photo was part of his courtship of Mrs. Weiner? Or some intern he was chasing before he got married? He doesn't want the authenticity of the photo further investigated because it's moderately embarrassing even though in another context. (I can certainly think of some pretty dumb stuff I did that fortunately was not recorded for posterity.) Someone somehow got a copy, hacked his twitter account and the rest is (yawn) media fodder. So what's the BFD?
- timteeter
June 2, 2011 at 12:21pm
That's true, libref, but there might have been a reasonable if risky assumption on the part of said president that the affair of the heart (or other organs) he was engaging in could have stayed a secret in 1995. Wiener would be an idiot if he believed that a digital photo could be kept secret in 2011.
- ironyroad
June 2, 2011 at 12:28pm
I think this has more to do with Mrs. Wiener (that's so hilarious in a juvenile sort of way) than any political fallout. I agree with timteeter that even smart people can do dumb stuff in a moment of innocent brain cramp. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. As one who has to explain a few moments of brain cramp stupidity to my better half.....I feel his pain. Unfortunalely, we'll never know the inside personal stuff.
- desertdog
June 2, 2011 at 4:26pm
The strangest, and maybe most 'damning' thing about this story is Weiner refusing to say it wasn't him in the photo, certainly. Obviously this is embarrassing. And there are also some fishy elements, mainly the patriotusa76 fellow who jumped all over the tweet originally. But how concerned should anyone really be about a 36-year old single man flirting with this girl? He wasn't trying to abuse his position, it seems. This hardly establishes him as a pathological creep. I fail to see how this story is more than an embarrassment, albeit a significant one.
- speedyturkey
June 2, 2011 at 6:10pm
puleeze let this end the embarrassment that is Anthony Weiner. run him out of Congress, forget about even thinking of mayor of NYC. Jon Stewart has roasted this weiner to a crisp. btw, maybe now someone will ask the NYT why they never mentioned his wedding ceremony to Huma Abedin - one of the most curious news blackouts ever for the Gray Lady to fail to note a summer wedding of a sitting Congressman to Hillary's Huma, and officiated by former president Bill - not even two lines in the Metro news section.
- K2K
June 3, 2011 at 8:38am
Bunch of fucking bullshit all the way around from everyone involved with this crap and everyone ventilating it, except, I'm presuming, the poor girl who got the inappropriate tweet.
- basman
June 3, 2011 at 2:38pm
... It would have been extremely dumb for a sitting president to get sucked off in the Oval Office... Hey, this a new, earthier liberalref. I'm liking it (:-))
- basman
June 3, 2011 at 2:46pm