Anthony Weiner, after seven years in Congress, aims to move to Gracie Mansion

By DUNCAN OSBORNE

Anthony David Weiner leaned back in a chair, propped his legs up on a windowsill, and yawned now and again as he spoke with a visitor at his William Street campaign headquarters early on an August weekday morning.

Normally, the four-term congressman would be living at a slower pace, perhaps even vacationing, with Congress out of session until after Labor Day, but he wants to be the 109th mayor of New York City and Weiner is running hard with an eye toward the September 13 Democratic primary.

“I’m trying to do three things in this race,” he said. “One is I’m trying to restore the notion that campaigns should be about ideas not just conflict. I think anybody would have to concede that I’ve won the primary of ideas.”

Weiner, 40, discussed his proposals for covering the estimated 1.8 million New Yorkers who have no health insurance, cutting taxes for the city’s middle class, improving public education, and, of course, a number of issues that are of particular concern to the queer community. These ideas are the tangible expression of his second campaign theme.

“We have to start realizing that the traditional ways of organizing campaigns in this city for Democrats haven’t worked terribly well, gathering up the largest political machinery, getting endorsements from as many other famous people and elected officials as you can,” Weiner said. “It doesn’t resonate with where most people are. They want to see your affirmative vision. They want more of a grassroots sense from a campaign and that’s what we’ve tried to do.”

Currently, the Democratic Party uses “1970s and 80s thinking” when it should be speaking to the city’s middle class, Weiner said, spelling out his third theme.

“The third thing that I think really animates this campaign is the idea that there are really millions of hardworking, middle class New Yorkers and those that aspire to make it into the middle class whose challenges are not being confronted,” he said. “Mike Bloomberg talks clear past them and I think to some degree my Democratic colleagues sometimes don’t pay enough attention to them either.”

A Mayor Weiner would give any New Yorker earning less than $150,000 a year a 10 percent tax cut. He would pay for that—it would cost an estimated $206 million a year—by creating a new, seventh tax bracket on those earning over one million dollars a year that would generate $79 million annually and by cutting waste in the city budget five percent per year. Weiner estimated that reducing waste would generate $1.7 billion annually. Some of that cash would also contribute to another proposal that would benefit the middle class.

“I talk about giving teachers a raise, restoring a sense of discipline in the schools, getting back to the basics in our schools,” he said. “These are animating ideas to me because we need to preserve the place the public schools have as an economic ladder for middle class families.”

To achieve his $1.7 billion, Weiner would require city agencies to rank their programs by “most effective, least effective, the most bang for the buck, the least bang for the buck, the most successful in solving the problems and the least.” Those that do not improve would face an uncertain future.

“Every commissioner is going to have to come to me at least twice a year and say, ‘This is how I rank them,’” he said. “We’re going to say to the bottom five percent you’re either going to have to reprogram it to make it work or we’re going to eliminate it.”

His defense of the public schools is personal. Weiner, a New York native, attended the city’s public schools his entire life and his mother taught in the schools for 31 years. His support for the middle class extended even to giving his father, a lawyer, a gentle lecture.

At a May 7 campaign event, held at the Park Slope brownstone in which he grew up, his father appeared after it was over carrying two large Rite Aid shopping bags. Weiner told his father he should take his business to the small locally owned pharmacies instead of patronizing the big chains that do not provide health benefits to their employees.

Whether those small businesses provide health insurance to their employees is debatable, but Weiner proposes to give them a hand on that score. The city, in a Weiner administration, would get those businesses to join in insurance-buying pools that might make health insurance more affordable for them. That is good for the employees and it certainly benefits the city to reduce the number of uninsured. As Weiner said at the May 7 event, “They are not not getting healthcare, they are getting healthcare in the most expensive way possible.”

When uninsured people get sick they can end up in hospital emergency rooms, including those in city-run hospitals, getting treated for illnesses that are better handled by a clinic or a private physician. The emergency room care is far more expensive and in the city-run hospitals the city pays the entire bill. Weiner will save some of that money by enrolling more residents in Medicaid, the government-run health plan for the poor and disabled.