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"FacebookPinterest\n\nHere is just one small, possibly illustrative, sideshow of Cirque du Weiner, and it has to do with how the Candidate and Huma Abedin designed the rollout of the ill-fated mayoral campaign, right at the start of the Summer Without Shame, and how it came to be that he managed to cheat The New York Times Magazine, yet walk away himself feeling cheated.\n\nIn the early months of spring, having spent his very brief\u00A0 \"retirement\" consulting and planning his next move, Weiner and Huma Abedin agreed that a run for mayor was now possible. This could work. Abedin was the perfect advisor and, really, the only endorsement Weiner required. She had forgiven him for his virtual cheating: Couldn't you?\n\nSo Weiner and Abedin agreed to meet with the profilist Jonathan Van Meter for their big Times Magazine cover story. This was the crown jewel of the rollout, the sine qua non of it all. It portrayed a couple who'd gone through agony, but had come out all right. Weiner was a new man. Since Abedin herself is a woman of serious political ambition and promise, it surprised few that she seemed more prominent in the cover photograph even than the Candidate. But, due in no small measure to that prime journalistic real estate, suddenly there was a buzz in the air and its name was Weiner. He came out of the gate not just as a contender but as an unstoppable-seeming front-runner. His admirers and headline writers everywhere rejoiced.\n\nThen came Sydney Leathers. This was an awful turn of events, especially for Abedin. Weiner had allowed her to pretend, to the Times Magazine (and in an especially cozy item in People magazine) that the family ship had been righted. It's still unclear exactly when she knew.\n\nWhen the second phase of the scandal broke, immediately there was a lot of murmuring about Jonathan Van Meter and the Times Magazine, whose story had run three months earlier: How could they have been so gullible? So manipulated?\n\nWhat people fundamentally misunderstood about Van Meter's story, and therefore about the entire campaign rollout\u2014according to Weiner\u2014is that it wasn't the piece he'd hoped for. He wanted something far worse.\n\n\"The problem was that the story was completely different from what we thought would be written,\" he told me. \"I thought there'd be thousands of questions about the sexting. But there wasn't a lot of conversation about that. We had a guy [Van Meter] who wasn't tough enough. We needed someone to just tear away at me. And not someone who would do something sympathetic\u2026. He wrote an aftermath story, about two interesting people. Later, I thought, \u2018We didn't get this done. Of the hundred things we wanted to do, the one thing we wanted to accomplish was to get that out there!'\"\n\n\"What about bringing it up yourself?\" I asked. \"Would that have been too hard to do?\"\n\n\"I should have!\" Weiner said. \"That's on the list of the hundred mistakes you make in a campaign. I should've said, \u2018Other things happened in the interim,' to get that out there. That's what I should have done!\"\n\nVan Meter is infuriated to be dismissed as \"not tough enough.\" First off, he says, it's not as though Weiner and Abedin phoned the Times Magazine and told them to send a random reporter on over. They chose him, specifically because they'd liked his previous features about Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, published in Vogue three years apart. \"In that experience, I spent a lot of time around Huma\u2014and she said to Anthony that if Jonathan Van Meter does it, that is the kind of writer I'm comfortable talking to,\" he says. \"I was chosen. They knew exactly what kind of story and what kind of writer they were going to get.\"\n\nAnd he felt they'd gotten to know each other. He trusted them. Van Meter says he spent not fifty hours with Weiner (as the Candidate emphasized to me) but something nearer to fifteen. And he liked Weiner, just as I did. Weiner was good company. (Nobody ever denied that, except for, you know, Washington, D.C.) Van Meter had the extra burden of an enduring admiration and respect for Huma. There was a lot of love going on, all over the place. An unbreakable trust.\n\nEverything Weiner and Abedin showed him, Van Meter says, so deeply etched a portrait of a changed man that it quite literally never occurred to him to ask the Question: \"Did you keep sexting after you left Congress?\"\n\nMoreover, it never struck anyone at the Times to wonder. It never entered their minds. Van Meter intended not to write about sexting but about how this well-known couple had endured the hot lights of a full-out political scandal. Especially from Huma's vantage point. Out of context, it does sound na\u00EFve that Van Meter blames Weiner for not opening up to \"the reporter he is supposed to be telling everything to,\" since that might be a level of trust Weiner, along with a few other politicians, has never fully earned.\n\nFull disclosure: I wrote for the Times Magazine over a period of ten years, and I can tell you that the editors think of every logical question (as they do at GQ). They don't traffic in lazy pieces. As the writer, you work every angle of the story until, pale and exhausted, you wish for nothing more than the sweet release of death. They're very good. Still, I'd have utterly no reason to defend them (if they needed defending). And I have high regard for Van Meter, though I've never met him.\n\nOf course, it would be the easiest thing in the world for me, here, to come off as the savvy cat and claim that, sure, I'd have asked the Question. But I can't know if that's true. I've given it a lot of thought, with all the comforts of hindsight, and I can see Van Meter's logic. In the Neverland of Weiner's brand-new, family-friendly persona, the Question might have sounded off-key and out-of-date. It might be like asking Lee Harvey Oswald, \"So, have you killed any other presidents since Friday?\"\n\nVan Meter was so personally stung by the Leathers revelations, upon seeing Weiner's July 23 press conference to confess, again, and ask for a second chance (actually a third), that he was depressed enough to take to his bed for two days. \"It was instantly clear that what had once been considered by so many people a triumph of access in journalism had now turned to shit,\" he now says. \"I was really bummed out.\"\n\nUp until now, Van Meter has not commented on what he sees as Weiner's betrayal\u2014even when his editors at the Times asked him to post a blog comment, and despite the 140-pronged rudenesses that now were greeting him on Twitter. People were throwing around terms such as \"vacuous\" and \"airhead,\" which struck Van Meter as \"mean and unfair.\" But when Weiner talked to me of not getting the right reporter\u2014of the reporter not being tough enough\u2014that was it. He decided to speak out. \"Out of my misplaced sense of decency,\" he says, \"I kept my mouth shut for a really long time, and then here is one more miscalculation by Anthony because now he decides to come after me?\n\n\"But Anthony can look you square in the eye and deny things he's done,\" Van Meter adds. \"He's bifurcated in some way. There is something wrong.\"\n\nWhat's extra galling to Van Meter is that, from what he's heard, Weiner and Abedin had mapped out in advance how to avoid the Question, and try to brass it out: \"People who know Anthony well have told me that the two of them, before they started their interviews with me, discussed whether they were going to tell me about the fact that he fell off the wagon. Huma wanted him to do it. But he did not want to tell the story\u2014because, as someone said, he did not want his parents to know!\"\n\n\"And this tells you everything you need to know,\" Van Meter adds. \"This bifurcated personality he has. Part of him is like a 13-year-old boy who got caught masturbating in his bedroom, you know?\"\n\nNot that Van Meter is claiming that his reportage, in the end, was perfect. \"I fell hook, line, and sinker, for everything he said because, as a journalist, I just made that choice,\" he says. \"Based on that fact that I like and respect Huma so much that if she can forgive him, well, I can forgive him.\"\n\nBut surely this was also a betrayal by Abedin. She didn't steer him right, either. Yet, because he thinks of her as suffering from a marital Stockholm Syndrome, Van Meter doesn't criticize her. He even hopes nothing he says here hurts her feelings. After being double-teamed by them, he still jokes, \"We are all Huma now,\" and was going to make a T-shirt that read \"I'm Only Huma.\"\n\n\"Somehow Anthony is blaming me and my 8,000-word story for the fact that everything turned to shit for him. I wish I knew if there was a word for all this. There's probably a German word for it. And maybe I am na\u00EFve, but I am telling you that when you spend so many hours with somebody, you really do feel like you get a sense of who they are, and you make decisions based on that.\"\n\nHe's quite right on that one. Writing a true profile is a genuinely weird endeavor. It's like being in love without the love: You want to know every little thing about the subject. You will follow them anywhere, always wondering what they're thinking or why they move their hands like that. You think about them when they are not around. During the reporting phase, if you're any good at what you do, you're a little bit insane. But you get time to cool off later: take the real measure, look at the experience from a distance.\n\nWell, live and learn. I like to do both those things, sometimes right at the same time. Van Meter did not come into this, nor wants to become, a cynical reporter who didn't believe a word this politician said. But he'll be more wary next time.\n\n\"I have always thought that people can't fake it for too long,\" he says. \"They eventually become themselves in front of you\u2014but, in this case, that principle under which I do my job didn't work. What I learned is when you're writing about politicians, you have to be more skeptical.\n\n\"I mean, I like to write about people who I like!\" he adds. \"I liked Anthony Weiner before his first scandal and then, after the scandal, I still liked him. That's what I learned: that there are certain people about whom you must be more skeptical. I would be a tiny bit more skeptical. That's what I would be. Not a lot!\"\n\nOnce I got to Weiner in July, there was no gold for him left to hide. (Yeah, there probably was.) He knew that GQ didn't want a daily political story about beach restoration and alternate-side parking. He knew what I was there for, and it took five weeks of seeing me on the trail to get him to choose me this time. And even during all of that, there were moments when he went too far\u2014when he got greedy in trying to win me over. When I asked him if he had regrets about the campaign, he actually said, \"Huma and the press conference. Rather than do that, I should've called you and asked, \u2018Do you want to do a story?'\" (Oh, Mr. Weiner, sir! You shameless flatterer!)\n\nAs for Jonathan Van Meter, I don't think he's coming back to give Weiner another chance, and frankly I've lost count of which chance this would be. His reaction to this feature is that \"No one should interview Anthony again. He is the least reliable narrator of his own story that I have ever encountered. And I've interviewed people in prison, who have chopped people up\u2014prisoners who are charming and funny and smart. And well dressed.\"\n\nAdditional reporting by Hilary Elkins"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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