Elinor Carucci for The New York Times
Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner in the office they share in their Manhattan apartment.
One day in early February, I met Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin for breakfast at the Gramercy Park Hotel, one of their regular joints, just a few blocks from their apartment on Park Avenue South. The first thing Weiner said when I sat down was that their 13-month-old son, Jordan, had just moments ago taken his first step. They were both giddy, kvelling with baby-pride, especially Weiner, who, with all his free time, has become his son's primary caretaker. This is what life is like now for the man whose name is invariably followed in print by some version of "the disgraced former congressman who sent out a lewd picture of himself via Twitter." He seems to spend much of his time within a five-block radius of his apartment: going to the park with Jordan; picking up his wife's dry cleaning and doing the grocery shopping; eating at his brother Jason's two restaurants in the neighborhood. This is what happens after a scandal: Ranks are closed and the world shrinks to a tiny dot. It is a life in retreat. And for a man who was known, pre-scandal, for his overweening ambition, his constant presence on cable news, his hard-charging schedule that verged on lunacy, well, it has been quite a change.
Elinor Carucci for The New York Times
Abedin said, ''I have now gotten used to people asking, over and over again, 'How is Anthony?' ''
Because of their careers, Weiner and Abedin are pros when it comes to small talk, chatting about the baby, their two cats and the pleasures of domestic life. But as the conversation shifted into why we were there, Weiner got serious and went into problem-solving mode; Abedin, while still cheerful and talkative, started to look a little nervous. As Abedin pointed out to me later, she has a tendency toward pessimism. "Anthony," she said, "is a glass-half-full person. He doesn't dwell. He's not negative."
They present as two people who have painstakingly pieced their private life back together: they cook dinner and watch TV and have friends and family over to their spacious prewar apartment for special occasions. They seem to be functioning again as a couple, even unselfconsciously bickering in front of the waiter. But what they do not yet have a handle on is their public life. Before he resigned from Congress, Weiner was leading in early polls as a candidate for mayor of New York, and almost immediately after the scandal, there was speculation about whether he could make a comeback. Could anyone survive such an ignominious end to a Congressional career? Much less someone whose attack-dog tendencies made him so many enemies? The two of them had seemed to be a power couple on the cusp of a Clintonian rise. Now what?
When they appeared in People magazine last summer, it looked like a toe-dipping of sorts. (The couple say that it was entirely for the purpose of getting a picture of Jordan published so it would no longer have value and the paparazzi would stop camping out on their corner.) But there were other reports that suggested they were testing the waters for a return to politics: Last July, The New York Post reported that Weiner was weighing a run in 2013, because after that his public matching funds would expire. In January, The New York Daily News reported that Weiner's name was among the candidates voters were asked about in a poll of a five-way mayoral primary. And The New York Post reported that pollsters had asked voters about a run for comptroller, pitting Weiner against the Manhattan Borough president, Scott Stringer.
At breakfast, Weiner quickly put all the speculation to rest: he is eyeing the mayor's race. He told me that his political committee spent more than $100,000 on polling and research by Obama's longtime pollster, David Binder (a detail that would be made public — and prompt a flurry of news reports — in mid-March when a spending report was filed with the city's Campaign Finance Board). The focus of the poll, Binder says, was the question "Are voters willing to give him a second chance or not, regardless of what race or what contest?" And the answer? "There was this sense of 'Yeah, he made a mistake. Let's give him a second chance. But there are conditions on that, and there are a couple of things we're going to want to know: What have you been doing since this incident occurred? Did you learn anything from this mistake? How did you deal with it?' They want to know that they've put it behind them."
By agreeing to be interviewed, Weiner and Abedin would seem to be trying to give voters what they want — and gauge public reaction. But it's clear that the idea of talking about the scandal and its aftermath appeals to them on a personal level too. "We have been in a defensive crouch for so long," Weiner said. "We are ready to clear the decks on this thing." Their lives have become too small, too circumscribed, too claustrophobic for a couple accustomed to public life. They haven't been to a major event together — no White House Correspondents Dinner, no red-carpet events — in nearly two years. "We didn't want to make other people uncomfortable," Abedin said, "but also, we just didn't want to deal with it. I have now gotten used to people asking, over and over again, 'How is Anthony?' Oh, he's good! 'But how is he doing?' He's doing fine."
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