Anthony Weiner has a big set of balls. He kept out of the public eye for a couple of years following his resignation from Congress in 2011 after tweeting obscene photographs of his not-very-private parts to several women and then lying through his teeth about them. Now in 2013 he has come back from the political dead to have another go at public office. This time he set his goals even higher and went after the job of Mayor of New York with a very impressive election campaign that asked that he be judged purely on his rather remarkable record as very successful seven term Congressman.
He is unquestionably quite a charmer. An ebullient enigmatic and totally fearless man, who was highly respected not only for what he achieved for his constituents, but the fierce way that he was quite prepared to take on any sort opposition to get things to happen.
Before his election campaign to be the Democratic candidate even started, he gave unfettered access to filmmakers Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg who wanted to make a fly-on-the-wall documentary of this journey that would hopefully end up at Gracie Mansion. It was a decision that he may possibly now regret, and it is one that his wife, his most loyal supporter, would most definitely rue when another scandal would blow up in their faces.
Weiner’s main electoral plank was that everyone…. especially him …deserved to be forgiven and allowed a second chance. It worked very very well indeed and he used all his charisma to convince both the media and the public and very quickly he was not only leading in the polls, but by quite a substantial margin. So much so that if any of the rival candidates tried to drag up his past at one of their public debates, they would actually get booed by the audience.
Undoubtedly one of Weiner’s biggest advantages was the unwavering support of his politically savvy wife Huma Abedin who was also one of Hilary Clinton’s most senior aides. When the scandal broke back in 2011, the Weiners talked about separating, but after conciliation counseling they very publicly decided to give their marriage a second chance.
Then just when things simply could not be going better for Weiner and it looked like the Mayor’s job was now his for the taking, right out of the blue some more women started to claim that he had also sent lurid personal photographs to them too. At first these claims related to the time when he was still a Congressman, but then very soon others surfaced from after his resignation as obviously he hadn’t kicked his sexting habits at all.
To be fair some of the women coming forward had not been totally innocent parties, and so Weiner hastily gathered his team together and told them to hold fast and that it would all blow over within 72 hours. It didn’t, and it actually very quickly escalated as yet more women came forward with very similar claims, and Weiner’s once prosperous campaign started to fall completely apart right under the watchful eye of the documentarian’s cameras.
Weiner never ever stopped trying to bluster his way out of the sordid mess that it had fast become, but Huma said little on camera. In fact it was remarkable that she even allowed them to keep filming at what was another major betrayal by the man that she had invested her whole life in. If we had been sympathetic to Weiner’s cause at the beginning, we were now totally in Huma’s corner. He didn’t do himself any favors too by losing his temper very badly a couple of times in incidents which became viral videos once they went public.
Weiner’s new fall from grace was more shocking for everyone involved, but it was like manner from heaven for the filmmakers who kept the cameras rolling to the very bitter end ensuring that they had one of the most gripping political documentaries for a very very long time.
Labels: 2016, biography, documentary, Sundance
