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Representative Anthony D. Weiner has opposed Mayor Bloomberg’s bid for a third term. He is seen here at the Columbus Day parade. James Estrin/The New York TimesRepresentative
Anthony D. Weiner was sitting in the back corner of a Starbucks in Lower Manhattan, a cellphone headset tethered to his ear, a set of talking points in front of him and 15 bloggers on the line waiting for his latest attack on the mayor’s plan to engineer a third term in office.
“The mayor said the days of Boss Tweed will forever be over, but, no, they’re back,” he declared, as he gestured for an aide to bring him a document.
Mr. Weiner — a combative, Brooklyn-born champion of the middle class — was considered the front-runner in next year’s mayoral race until the current occupant of that office, Michael R. Bloomberg, upended the city’s political world by challenging the city’s term-limits law so that he could run for re-election. Suddenly, a wide-open race for Mr. Weiner looked painfully crowded.
So now Mr. Weiner is transforming his candidacy into a full-throated populist crusade against the billionaire Mr. Bloomberg’s proposal for a third term, hurling his thin frame in front a political locomotive roaring down the tracks.
In the process, Mr. Weiner said he had found his voice — and purpose — in the 2009 election for mayor: defending New York City’s ordinary, working people against the self-interested, back-room deals of its most powerful.
He has quickly become the most prominent and relentless of the mayor’s grass-roots opponents, who accuse Mr. Bloomberg and his wealthy friends in the business world of trying to circumvent the will of New York’s voters, who backed term limits twice, in 1993 and 1996.
Representative Anthony D. Weiner has become a fixture on the steps of City Hall, opposing Mayor Bloomberg’s bid for a third term. James Estrin/The New York Times
Mr. Weiner, 43, has held a blizzard of press conferences and rallies, becoming a fixture on the steps of City Hall over the last two weeks. He has set up a Web site, LetNYCVote.com, that encourages city residents to testify against the mayor’s plan at a public hearing at City Hall on Thursday. And he has posted videos on his Facebook.com profile accusing Mr. Bloomberg and his allies on the City Council of “trying to take away your chance to vote.”
To Mr. Weiner, fighting Mr. Bloomberg on term limits is the capstone of a decade-long battle on behalf of the city’s vast, overlooked middle. “This issue is another classic example of the powerful and moneyed elite ignoring the idea that are a lot of other people in the city who should be part of our civic conversation,” he said.
“So I have embraced this fight, not only because obviously I have a lot at stake, but because it’s so much about my single animating vision of the city.”
The odds appear to be stacked against him. Mr. Bloomberg is convinced that he has enough support in the Council to pass legislation that would allow him and dozens of other elected officials to serve 12 consecutive years, rather than eight.
If the legislation passes, Mr. Bloomberg is expected to spend about $80 million in his re-election campaign — $20 million of it dedicated to attacking Mr. Weiner, according to people familiar with the plan.
By contrast, Mr. Weiner has raised $5 million for his campaign, according to the latest city records. Even with matching funds from the city, his campaign spending is expected to pale in comparison to that of Mr. Bloomberg, whose fortune is — or at least was recently — estimated at $15 billion.
In a lengthy interview this week, Mr. Weiner said that he “understands the prodigious influence of wealth,” but that he will not back down, even if Mr. Bloomberg prevails in rewriting the term-limits law and enters the 2009 race.
“Look, I am running for mayor, and I fully expect to be the next mayor of this city,” he said. Mr. Weiner, a five-term representative, ran an unsuccessful race against Mr. Bloomberg for mayor in 2005. A Bloomberg re-election campaign “”would certainly be a different race,” he said, but “I still don’t think its going to happen.”
“It’s so offensive to just the entire way that the checks and balances of government are supposed to work and the way that things go down in New York,” he said.
Mr. Weiner is banking on a backlash against the mayor, which could work in his favor if the race boils down to the two candidates.
Mark Green, who ran against Mr. Bloomberg in 2001, said the mayor’s third-term aspirations “will either bury or boost Weiner. But it’s a little too early to know whether Bloomberg’s maneuver will trigger a big public outcry or a little one. It could be big.”
Since he learned that Mr. Bloomberg would try to run again — a headline flashed across his BlackBerry on Sept. 30, nearly knocking him off his feet, he recalled — Mr. Weiner has thrown himself into the debate.
He and his staff have been researching whether the legislation before the Council might violate federal voting-rights laws or city conflict-of-interest statutes, reaching out to experts on New York City election law, like Randy Mastro, a former deputy mayor, and Richard Emery, who is also a civil rights lawyer.
Among their discoveries: the City Council held nine public hearings before passing legislation on horse carriages, but will hold just two before voting on whether to change term limits.
Mr. Weiner has attended rallies and press conferences with Letitia James and Bill de Blasio, council members who oppose the extension and are instead calling for a public referendum on whether to alter term limits. (Mr. Weiner himself still opposes term limits, and voted against them in 1993 and 1996.)
His push lacks the gloss of Mr. Bloomberg’s campaigns. In videos high on outrage but low on production value, he stands in front of City Hall, jacket off and sleeves rolled up, attacking Mr. Bloomberg’s strategy. “This is your building,” he says, pointing to the office he hopes to occupy.
He said it is working. He was still in skates after his weekly hockey game this week when a member of the opposing team told him to “keep up the fight,” he said, and an office worker in Manhattan called out to him, “They’re not going to get away with this!”
The campaign is vintage Weiner, who is known for outresearching, outpoliticking and out-fund-raising his opponents, first as a council member, then in Congress. And it also bears his trademark self-certainty. He predicted that come Election Day 2009 , Mr. Bloomberg “would find himself voting for me.”
Mr. Weiner has reserved his most stinging criticism for the mayor and the speaker of the Council, Christine C. Quinn, who has endorsed Mr. Bloomberg’s term-limits plan. He calls the agreement “the mother of al back-room deals.”
“Never again can the speaker and the mayor talk about their desire to reform government, talk about their desire to get back room deals out of City Hall,” he said.
But he has been careful to not pick a fight with the city’s business titans, at least by name. Many, like Jerry Speyer, the real estate developer who urged Mr. Bloomberg to seek a third term, were major donors to the Weiner campaign. And Mr. Weiner said that he needed their backing to be an effective mayor.
“These people are important elements of how we are going to run a successful city,” he said. “I am not running against them. But there is a whole other city out there that sometimes I think those folks don’t realize we need to address.”
He said he understood why those business leaders might want to support Mr. Bloomberg. “It’s not wrong for people to want Mike Bloomberg to have a third term.
That’s fine,” he said. But with the mayor rushing to change the term-limits law through legislation, rather than a referendum, he said, “we are not having that argument. And that’s what’s truly troubling to me.”
Queens Borough President Helen Marshall has done it twice in nine years. Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer has done it twice in five years. Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr. has done it once (the living wage bill) in two years.
