Anthony Weiner and the Politics of Narcissism

The new documentary Weiner which follows Anthony Weiners 2013 run for mayor of New York highlights the perilous...
The new documentary “Weiner,” which follows Anthony Weiner’s 2013 run for mayor of New York, highlights the perilous interplay between depravity and self-righteousness in American politics.COURTESY IFC FILMS

Huma Abedin is thirty-nine years old; her husband, Anthony Weiner, is fifty-one; and each of them has been working full time in politics since they graduated from college. So “Weiner,” the extraordinary new documentary about them, which tracks Weiner’s attempt to recover from public disgrace by running for mayor of New York in 2013, is not only about a marriage but also about what it takes to be a political professional. In personality, they are opposites. Abedin, long Hillary Clinton’s closest aide and now the vice-chairwoman of her Presidential campaign, is more comfortable in back rooms than onstage. Her husband, who was a rising New York congressman during the George W. Bush Administration, is an antic creature of combative press conferences, rallies, and ethnic-pride parades, where the camera repeatedly finds him grabbing a flag and waving it around, like some American Gavroche. His mode of expression is calibrated liberal apoplexy.

Weiner, who grew up in Park Slope, Brooklyn, tends to describe himself as an outer-borough schlub and his wife as a figure of executive-class glamour, but in the documentary’s quieter moments, out of public view, the distance between them collapses. Twenty minutes into the film, at a moment when Weiner still had a chance in the Democratic primary, the candidate is sitting slumped in an office chair, elbows on the armrests and fingers at his temples, fixedly watching Abedin work the phones. She hangs up. Evenly, she says, “He says he can’t help us because he’s on John Liu’s finance committee.”

Weiner is annoyed. “This is your A-list?” he says to his wife.

Like a lot of what Weiner says, this exists somewhere in the realm between insult and mutual goad. Quickly, they are back at it, side by side, his-and-hers phone jockeys. Weiner, jocular, holding a golf club: “How’s it going, my brother!” Abedin, gossipy: “How was the engagement? I want all the details.” A few minutes later, Abedin and Weiner are off the phone, and happy. “Five thousand dollars in five minutes,” Weiner says. “Not bad.” Shortly afterward, we see them in the back of a black car, joking with each other, in one of the few moments of genuine joy between them: two pros, triumphant.

The filmmakers, Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg, undoubtedly wanted to make a documentary about Weiner because of the facts of his disgrace. In 2011, after having at first denied it, Weiner admitted to having sent pictures of his penis (in most of the pictures, which became public, his penis was erect but obscured inside his underwear) to women who’d written to him online in order to cheer him on. The President said publicly that he thought Weiner should resign, and eventually he did. After much public speculation (and, according to Abedin, a lot of therapy), Weiner’s marriage held, and together they decided on a mayoral run, and agreed to let Kriegman and Steinberg film the campaign. It turned out—and this revelation, which came midway through his candidacy, became the film’s narrative pivot—that while he and Abedin had been reconciling, and then planning his political comeback, Weiner had continued to send pictures of his penis to female fans.

It was the kind of scandal—really, Weiner is the kind of guy—that provokes furious sanctimony. In the documentary, a man in a yarmulke bullies Weiner out of a bakery, yelling about his treatment of his family. The MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell says, on air, to Weiner, “I think there is something wrong with you.” At a town hall on City Island, a man in the audience announces that Weiner has “broken the trust of the people.” Politics is often said to be a profession for the morally bankrupt. But it also inspires a pompous priggishness in its audience. The sensation of watching "Weiner" is seeing these two forces—depravity on the inside and self-righteousness on the outside—accelerate each other.

The domestic drama that emerges in “Weiner,” once the second scandal breaks, has three principals: the mayoral candidate, Abedin, and the camera between them. Apparently on the recommendation of Clinton’s advisers, Abedin withdraws from her husband’s campaign. While he films a last-ditch commercial, she sits eating a slice of pizza. “If you’re absolutely not going to do anything more for the campaign, then yeah, start now,” Weiner yells at her. As he heads out to the polls on Election Day, he pleads with her to join him (“my last campaign,” he says), but she retreats to their apartment. On camera, the candidate sometimes cuts a pitiable figure: wandering around his apartment with an old man’s walk, slow, head slumped. When Weiner expresses a view of himself, it is more or less the conventional one. “Politicians are probably wired in some way that they need attention,” he confesses, to the camera.

Kriegman and Steinberg emphasize the tension between Weiner and his own staff, but their sympathies are with the staff. Early on, the filmmakers show a throng of optimistic young people heading out to campaign for Weiner and have the junior staffers explain how much they believe in the candidate. Later, the senior staffers, especially the communications director, Barbara Morgan, look tense and let down when Weiner comes clean to them, in his apartment. “Just a quick optics thing,” Abedin says, as Morgan is preparing to leave. “I assume those photographers are still outside. So you will look happy?”

Political documentaries often make the judgment that candidates do not deserve the people who work for them—that idealism, to narcissists, is “just an optics thing.” And yet the closer you get to Weiner’s campaign the less secure that judgment seems. On Election Day, Kriegman and Steinberg follow an officious young staffer named Andrew Noh, who runs up to Weiner at a park, where he is playing with his son. Another crisis is brewing: a woman named Sydney Leathers, a college student to whom Weiner once sent dick pics, is waiting outside his campaign office with media.* Noh has developed a driving route for Weiner to take, so that the candidate can avoid a confrontation; he keeps telling Weiner that he wants to give him "a tick-tock of my plan." Weiner has a plan of his own: the staffers and volunteers should go downstairs, holding Weiner signs, surround Leathers, and "chant the shit out of her." In this conversation, the young staffer keeps referring to Leathers by her "code name": Pineapple. A cameraman follows Noh as he walks away from Weiner. The staffer says his mission is to make sure Leathers "fucking fails at life today." Then he lights a cigarette.

There is one flareup during the Weiner campaign that the film does not mention—a scandal within a scandal. A former intern on Morgan’s staff, an aspiring journalist named Olivia Nuzzi (who has since become a pretty great political reporter at the Daily Beast), wrote an article shortly after leaving the campaign that suggested that much of Weiner’s staff was thinking about quitting. Morgan, feeling betrayed, responded by calling her former intern—to reporters, on the record—a “slutbag,” a “twat,” and a “cunt.” Employment requires two willing parties. The people in Weiner’s orbit were not simply betrayed by the congressman. They also chose to be there.

Just after viewing “Weiner,” I found myself calling up clips from the great old D. A. Pennebaker documentary “The War Room,” about the staffers who led Bill Clinton’s Presidential campaign in 1992. On Election Night, once it is clear that the patrician legacy of George H. W. Bush and the mania of Ross Perot are about to be vanquished, the campaign’s senior strategist, James Carville, stands surrounded by the campaign staff, thanking them. “There’s a simple doctrine: outside of a person's love, the most sacred thing they can give is their labor,” he says. “I’m a political professional. That’s what I do for a living, and I’m proud of it.” Carville tells them that they have changed how campaigns will be run in the future—they will be bottom-up, not top-down. “I was thirty-three years old before I went to Washington or New York. Forty-two before I won my first campaign.” He starts to break down. “You've been part of something special in my life. . . . I’ll never forget what y’all have done.” This is the speech that built the ethos consecrated in “The West Wing,” in which the political profession is heroic. It also came from the mouth of the consultant who, sixteen years later, would compare Bill Richardson to Judas Iscariot for endorsing Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton. The basic state of political professionals isn’t idealism that is betrayed into cynicism, and it isn’t cynicism that can be charmed into idealism. It is that each is a condition for the other.

There is a remarkable sequence in the first ten minutes of “Weiner” that is meant to establish the protagonist’s fame and bona fides. We see him railing angrily against his Republicans colleagues for limiting aid to the first responders of 9/11, turning to a G.O.P. colleague on camera and bullying him. “A frequent shouter on the House floor,” Roll Call called him. Weiner is called a fighter so often and with such admiration that it serves as a reminder of just how desperate progressives were, during the Bush Administration, for aggressive partisans. There is a temptation, given how close this family is to the Clintons and how strong the Clintons’ hold is on the institutional Democratic Party right now, to see Weiner and Abedin as emblematic of the corruption of the establishment, but in his ascendance Weiner pleased the populists as much as he did the insiders. It isn’t news that a cult of personality can swallow the person at its center. The news that comes in “Weiner” is how cheaply, in politics, that cult of personality can be won.

*A previous version of this post misstated Leathers's occupation.