| Politics We Don't Need Another Hero But in this year's oddball elections, it helps to sound like one. By David Weigel
Posted Thursday, May 23, 2013, at 10:45 PM ET  The roll-out of Anthony Weiner's midlife crisis-cum-mayoral campaign has gone about as well as the candidate could have hoped. He announced it via video, beating the tabloids' print deadlines, evading eponymous puns for one precious day. When he met the press, he juggled questions about his younger and more vulnerable days without a droplet of flop sweat. "People may decide they want to come forward and say, here's another email that I got or another photo," he yawned in a radio interview, repeating a stock line. "I'm certainly not going to do that." Good for him and better for us, but there's still something amiss with that schlocky launch video. Weiner runs through the highlights of his 12-year congressional career, and claims he "led the campaign for real health reform, that regular people can afford." There's no citation, not even some footnote crediting a roll call vote or a Center for American Progress blog comment. What was "real health reform?" Weiner's campaign didn't clarify for me. Luckily, having been awake for much of 2009 and 2010, I recall the congressman as a frequent cable news advocate for a bill that didn't pass—single payer, Canada-style, cradle-to-grave care. Weiner even introduced a Medicare repeal amendment and dared Republicans to support it, to prove that they wouldn't "stamp out the scourge of government-run, government-administered, single-payer health care." So Weiner was good at wrangling press. We knew that. "Who's better?" he told a ... To continue reading, click here.
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