Weinergate Won't Die
Ben Smith at Politico reports:
Trying to put last weekend’s ambiguous online mini-scandal behind him, Rep. Anthony Weiner told reporters outside his office Tuesday that he’s “not going to talk about this anymore.”
But Weiner, a veteran and champion of New York City’s media scrum, may be the single worst-placed congressman to hunker down and wait for a flap to fade.
The Queens congressman is a combative MSNBC star with a corresponding conservative target on his back. He is also viewed as the frontrunner in what is already shaping up as an intensely competitive Democratic primary for the 2013 election to replace Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He’s a media favorite, a source par excellence and a magnet for cable news cameras - on full display in two interviews broadcast by CNN Tuesday.
“It ain’t done. We don’t know what the facts are,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran New York Democratic consultant. “There are too many reporters asking too many questions to avoid any of this.”
After a long weekend’s fuss over a photograph of a man’s crotch, sent over his Twitter account, Weiner appears to have decided not to pursue an investigation that would conclusively settle how the image made its way online. He also refused repeatedly to answer direct questions about whether he’d taken or sent the photograph.
Technical data could settle this question. The photograph was uploaded to the site yfrog.com, which is integrated with Twitter, and either Twitter, yfrog, or both almost definitely have logs indicating the unique digital address of the computer or device that sent the image. (Twitter declined to comment on a specific customer; Imageshack, which owns yfrog, didn’t respond to a request for comment.) But Weiner told reporters, in a pair of impromptu and increasingly testy interviews outside his office on Capitol Hill, that he didn’t think asking the companies for that information or turning to law enforcement would end the story.
“I’m not convinced that there’s any value of anymore of me talking about it,” he said.
Weiner’s flat refusal to engage may or may not serve him well in Washington’s totally partisan environment, in which Democrats will defend him, and Republicans attack him, as usual. Back in New York, meanwhile, allies of his rivals - former comptroller William Thompson, Public Advocate Bill DeBlasio, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, Democrats all - are licking their chops.
“This is New York - he’s in deep doo-doo when it comes to future aspirations,” said a pleased adviser to one of his rivals. “You’ve got every enemy of his, and interested political reporters, all digging, because there’s something too weird about this.” ...
