While it may be impossible to choose who you love, you do not need to ask people to vote him into public office just because you love him. Huma Abedin, Anthony Weiner's wife, may have learned the wrong lesson from Hillary Clinton in this case.
Anthony Weiner, a.k.a. Carlos Danger, compared his wife's forgiveness to Hillary Clinton's. The comparison has angered many Clinton friends and fans. Yes, the Clinton scandal also included a flawed husband and a politically involved and forgiving wife, but aside from that, Weiner’s comparison is wholly unfair.
Not only has Weiner been caught in multiple scandals, even after promising to “never, ever” do it again, but he is also not nearly the intelligent political mind and public servant that President Clinton was. Clinton was one of the most brilliant political minds of a generation, while Weiner has shown little value in the political world outside of absurd entertainment. In his 12 years in Congress, he only managed to get one minor bill passed, on behalf of a donor.
Abedin was Hillary Clinton's top aide and is currently leading her transition team. Abedin had the support of Clinton associates in 2011 when she decided to stand by Weiner after he resigned from Congress in disgrace. But since Abedin once again stood by Weiner’s side after he admitted that he engaged in online "sexting," well after his resignation from Congress, the Clintons have been distancing themselves from the scandal, according to a top Democratic official who spoke to the New York Post.
“The Clintons are upset with the comparisons that the Weiners seem to be encouraging — that Huma is ‘standing by her man’ the way Hillary did with Bill, which is not what [Hillary] in fact did," the source said.
The Clintons changed the way Americans look at sex scandals. “They plowed through the ridicule, refused to slink away in shame like Gary Hart, said it was old news and argued that if Hillary didn’t object, why should voters?” wrote Maureen Dowd in the New York Times. The Clinton scandal proved that Americans are more worried about how a politician could directly change their lives than they care about his problematical personal life. This is both a reflection of the coarsening of society and a recognition that many politicians with duplicitous personal lives have proved to be great public leaders.
Hillary stood by her husband as a leader encouraging America to look past personal complications from which she herself had moved on. By trying to do the same thing, Abedin is endorsing a terribly flawed man for a major public office after he was caught once, then caught again. People are unlikely to forgive a blatantly broken promise and inaccurate apology.
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