On that, even a charitable reading of the record suggests that Weiner will have some persuading to do. As a young Brooklyn city councilman, from 1992 to 1998, he was a diligent constituent representative and a publicity seeker. But putting troubled local kids to work cleaning up graffiti and persuading the city to repaint the stairwells of its housing developments—two achievements he listed on his congressional Web site—hardly compares with leading the City Council (Quinn), managing the seven-hundred-member staff in the comptroller’s office (Thompson and Liu), or acting as the city’s primary public watchdog (de Blasio).
As the congressman for New York’s ninth district, which is carved out of Brooklyn and Queens, Weiner served with his trademark energy and ferocity, but he was largely removed from local debates on things like education, transport, and crime. At a mayoral forum this week, Sal Albanese, a veteran council member from Brooklyn who is also in the Democratic field, poked fun at Weiner for having just entered the dispute about charter schools and testing, which, for many Democratic voters and interest groups, are key issues. A twenty-page policy booklet that Weiner’s campaign recently posted online, titled “Keys to the City: 64 Ways to Keep New York the Capital of the Middle Class,” hardly mentions them.
Then there is the question of whether Weiner would be an effective administrator and leader, something Bloomberg has built his mayoralty on.
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