With Weiner Unlikely To Run, NYC Mayor Race Shifts

[Purveyor]

(06-11) 10:25 PDT New York (AP) --

There are many things that Rep. Anthony Weiner was never shy about, and one was telling people he hoped to become New York City's mayor.

But with a 2013 candidacy all but out of the picture for the embattled Democrat, and with Mayor Michael Bloomberg approaching the halfway mark of his third and final term, Weiner's Internet sex scandal has reshaped the political fight already simmering beneath the surface of New York City politics. It has even led a celebrity, "30 Rock" actor Alec Baldwin, to publicly toy with the idea of jumping in to the game.

Weiner "combined appeal to striving, middle-class people in the outer boroughs with the ideological left," many of them wealthier Manhattanites, said Hunter College political science professor Kenneth Sherrill. "That's a very hard combination to pull off."

More than half of city voters saying in a recent poll that Weiner shouldn't make a City Hall bid, leaving up for grabs the broad swath of votes that seemed destined for the Queens congressman.

MORE...

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/06/11/national/a102351D69.DTL

[Lionessa]

1. If AW's exposure on this keeps him from the NYC mayor's office

for a while longer and keeps him instead in Congress...

Might not be greatest for him, but it's sure greater for us, we need him (and many more like him) in Congress for at least a while longer.

[elocs]

2. Weiner chose to piss away his career in the House. He will never be mayor of NYC.

I'm betting by next weekend he will have resigned from the House as well.