Anthony WeinerThere was a fleeting moment in the 2008 presidential race when it looked like three New Yorkers might be on the ballot against one another. Alas, not a single one of them made it past the primaries — but there is still an awful lot of New York City in Washington these days.
One of those candidates is now Secretary of State; and the Obama administration has been recruiting New Yorkers at a frenzied pace: Thomas Frieden to the Centers for Disease Control*; Rocco Landesman to the National Endowment for the Arts; Shaun Donovan to Housing and Urban Development; Peggy Hamburg to the Food and Drug Administration; and, oh yes, Tim Geithner to Treasury.
But few New Yorkers bring more of a New York attitude to Washington than Democratic Congressman Anthony David Weiner. He is the self-confessed Dorian Gray of politics, a mirror image of the 27-year-old version of himself who in 1991 became the then-youngest elected member of New York’s City Council. He was elected to Congress in 1998, taking over the seat previously occupied by his mentor Chuck Schumer, who won election to the U.S. Senate.
Weiner now sits on the Judiciary Committee and the wide-reaching Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees telecommunications, public health, energy policy, environmental protection, and interstate and foreign commerce. He is also vice chairman of the Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet, which he believes should steer legislation for the nation’s cybersecurity. At a May 1 hearing, he wondered if the president should have “an on-off switch” for the Internet, or if there should be a “second tier” of the Internet for more secure operations:
He also very much wanted to run for Mayor of New York (again) this year, but probably won’t. Like many New Yorkers, he is fond of swearing. He is significantly entwined with Huma Abedin, a senior aide to Secretary of State Clinton. (If that marriage goes through, Hollywood won’t be able to resist — a Jewish/Muslim romantic-comedy version of an Albert Brooks film, maybe.) Oh yeah, Weiner also used to be a sort-of roommate to Jon Stewart, and has become Ben Affleck‘s political sage.
I ran into Weiner in an airport the other week and can testify that there is almost no question to which he won’t give a candid, informed, and fairly entertaining answer. So fire away in the comments section below. As always, we will post his answers to your questions in short course.
*Based near Atlanta; its predecessor agency was located there to fight malaria in the 1940′s.
Addendum: Weiner answers your questions here.
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Just last week the forecasted date of the exhaustion/bankruptcy of the Social Security trust fund was updated by four years. (The new estimate is the year 2037 v. the previous estimate of 2041.) Most current politicians won’t be in office in 2041, so there *seems* to be an incentive for politicians to focus on shorter-term issues and put off difficult decisions for the next generation of politicians. My question: How can the average citizen get politicians to begin to tackle ugly problems now, instead of ignoring the problem? Social Security and Medicare are looming disasters. I’m figuring that they will only get harder to fix the longer we don’t take action.
Do politicians need to be paid more? We can look up the compensation levels of our elected officials, and those levels are below what these talented people *could* likely make in the private sector. (Yes, I understand and appreciate the fact that these levels are still higher than the mean/median household income in the US.) Obviously, people respond to incentives. Would more people (and more talented people) want to serve in the public sector if they got paid more? A reasonable person could argue that we should pay our politicians more. Otherwise, we run into situations where only rich people run for President.
In your experience, what % of their time and/or energy do elected officials (on the national or state level) spend on running for re-election? Separate, but related, question: both McCain and Obama were sitting US Senators during their Presidential bids. Obviously they spent a lot of time/energy on the road. One could argue that they may have been too distracted to serve as the best Senators that they could have b/c they were on the road so much. Agree? Is this a problem?
Why do politicians continue to agree to use public dollars to generously fund the construction of new baseball stadiums (new Wash DC stadium, new Florida Marlins stadium, new Twins stadium, new NY stadiums)? It seems to me that the clear majority of academics and economists agree that it’s a poor use of tax dollars. You can look at it many different ways, but the data show that net jobs are not created. Plus, these are private businesses. What’s your opinion on this?
I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but I would bet that a higher % of politicians (i.e. higher than the national average) have their kids in private [and expensive] schools. Though politicians talk a good game about the quality of inner city schools, they don’t send their kids there. Incentives don’t seem to be properly aligned. What’s your take on this–should anything be done?
I get frustrated when a politician says: “I’m voting this way b/c this is what my constituents have told me that they want to vote,” because I think that this is confusing a democracy (1 person, 1 vote) with a system where we elect an official to make difficult decisions. Fine line here. In the future, what’s the mental framework that you’re going to use if you want to one way on a piece of legislation but a majority of your constituents want you to vote the other way?
A new newspaper organization seems to fail every other day. Do you feel that the existing print/newspaper industry supplies the public with a good so important that government intervention is needed?
I’m assuming that you travel. What cultural/societal/other characteristics have you seen in your travels that you would like the US to adopt? Which characteristics of Americans would you like others to adopt?