Anthony Weiner met me for breakfast. He ordered toast, two eggs, corned beef hash and a third chance at politics.
But before we broke bread at Cozy Soup and Burger near Astor Place, he made a prediction — that I would refer to him as “disgraced” in the headline or the first line of this column.
It felt like part provocation, part defense mechanism. Get the punches over with. Rip off the Band-Aid. After all, he has a lot of self-inflicted wounds.
To recap: In 2011, the then congressman tweeted a close-up photo of his underwear-clad crotch. He resigned from office. In 2013, he ran for mayor and his win was seemingly inevitable … until it emerged that he had been sexting with women who weren’t his wife, under the name Carlos Danger. He finished fifth in the Democratic primary. Then, in 2017, he pleaded guilty to sexting with an underaged teen.
Weiner went to prison for 15 months, followed by a stint in a halfway house.
The Post was unsparing, churning out a catalog of punny phallic headlines including “Weiner Exposed” and “Stroking Gun.”
But now he is seriously weighing a run for City Council to represent District 2, which includes Greenwich Village, Lower East Side, East Village, Flatiron, Union Square, Gramercy, Murray Hill and Kips Bay.
I simply wanted to know: Why the hell, at age 60, would he do that again? Is he some kind of masochist?
“I struggle with addiction, and I know what it is. I manage it,” Weiner told me. “No one of good faith, I think, made the argument that my acting out and my struggles had led me to be a bad congressman. I was really good at my job.”
Weiner claims he didn’t miss it during his exile. “I had no belief [a return] was possible.”
But things happened in this city that made him start to see a place for himself. In June, an unhinged 30-year-old man went on a stabbing spree on East 14th Street — a corridor which, for years, has looked like third-world bazaar — killing one New Yorker and injuring two others.
Weiner said it bothered him that officials put statements filled with “gobbledygook and no solutions.” Soon after, State Assemblyman Harvey Epstein, who will be his opponent in the upcoming primary, sent his constituents a notice about a recycling event.
“I could not imagine being a councilman and assemblyman, and that’s my reaction,” said Weiner. “I walk that block every day with my son, and I was like, this can’t be what the citizens want to see and hear now.”
As a resident of that district, I have to agree with the guy.
He — a lifelong Democrat — accuses local Dems of speaking in bumper-sticker slogans.
“Right now the conversations in Dem political circles are not serious enough about our need to solve problems,” Weiner said. “Dems are seen as not solving them and I want to change that.”
To do that, he would have to change the opinions of people who remember him as a punchline.
Weiner insists voters still approach him to get back in the game. As if on cue, an older woman from Brooklyn made a beeline for our table at Cozy, giddy to meet him.
I assume she wasn’t a plant.
But there are still many skeptics, and others who are flat-out disgusted by the idea of his return. And, of course, there’s curiosity. (Tell someone you’ve shared a meal with Anthony Weiner, and a flurry of questions follow.)
He adopted the voice of a skeptical New Yorker speaking about him: “Are we asking that he climb under the counter, curl up in a ball? He has to go work in a soup kitchen for 20 years and then he can come back?”
Shifting back to first-person, Weiner said, “I love this city, and it’s part of my identity. If the choice is [me] as a good councilman for the district, fighting for the right things, being good elected office — or I don’t because someone might be mean to me? Then I don’t see a real compelling argument not to run.”
He has paid his debt to society, he stressed — serving prison time for transferring obscene material to a minor.
Since leaving prison, he’s run a countertop company. He’s raising his 13-year-old son, Jordan, with ex-wife Huma Abedin. He’s the token lib on WABC radio.
He said he goes to recovery meetings to manage his “personal demons.” He walks the town with his rescue dog Billy, who will likely be on the campaign trail with him.
He’s not on dating apps, “but I go on dates from time to time.”
Weiner swears his ex — who filed for divorce in 2017 and is now engaged to Alex Soros — is on board. “Huma said, ‘This is kind of what you were born to do,’” he recalled. “She’s been encouraging.”
He told me to call her for a comment, before thinking better of it: “Nah, she won’t talk to you.”
Despite the fact that it’s hard to believe people who lived through his shocking mistakes would ever encourage him to live a public life, Weiner said his friends, his recovery sponsor and his relatives are behind him. His mother, who is “pushing 90,” was his first donor.
Missing from his corner this time is his longtime mentor, Senator Chuck Schumer.
“I’ve made a decision that goes back a while, with Chuck and [his wife] Iris, to give people space. I owe a lot of people amends. I have been systematically doing them. I owe him amends. I owe his family …” Weiner said, before trailing off.
So who in politics still talks to him? “Lots of people,” but he doesn’t want me calling around. He admits he’s more of an outsider.
“You guys hate me,” he said of The Post. “The left hates me, the right hates me.”
Weiner last ran a campaign more than a decade ago when his party was still lorded over by Obama and the Clintons.
But Covid, social media and rising illiberalism on the left have forged a realignment — a post-moral political era, where voters are less interested in personal indiscretions and more in a candidates’s ability to get things done.
We’ve already witnessed the improbable revival of President Trump. Andrew Cuomo, who was forced from office in a #MeToo scandal (among other things), is dominating polls for the mayoral race even though he hasn’t entered. Weiner could make a trifecta.
But he is hesitant to bite into this “narrative,” as he calls it.
“Cuomo says he did nothing wrong, Trump blamed the criminal justice system,” he said. “I pleaded guilty to obscenity. I accepted responsibility. I went to prison. I went to a halfway house.”
He believes people should vote for him “not in spite of the journey, but because of it.” He puts value in his “callouses.”
He’s eager to speak on issues: disorder, crime, fare evasion, protecting Jewish college students,
“People in Greenwich Village feel unsafe wearing a kippah,” Weiner said. “Lines have been crossed.”
As I asked for the check, he wondered if I got enough scandal questions for my editors. I laughed, but reiterated that my big question is still why in the world he would do this again.
“I’m really good at this. I’m good at coming up with ideas. I’m good at fighting to get those ideas passed.”
He has a lot to prove to people. Whether they can forgive remains to be seen. But it’s hard to imagine anyone forgetting.
