Weiner gets started stumping in NYC mayoral race

Residents greeted the Democratic candidate at a Harlem subway station with handshakes and plenty of concerns — about teacher contracts, manufacturing jobs, the problems of the mentally ill and other public policy issues. But not about the risque tweets and obfuscating explanations that have largely defined his image for the last two years.

Weiner seemed to relish his first time stumping since his last congressional race in 2010, answering voters and a throng of reporters with a combination of enthusiasm about airing his ideas for the city, humility about his past transgressions and occasional flashes of the wisecracking demeanor for which he was known in Washington. When one reporter asked how voters had embraced him so far, Weiner asked one of the residents in the crowd, Linda Smalls, for a hug.

“This is how they’ve embraced me,” he said.

“If citizens want to talk to me about my personal failings, that’s their right, and I’m going to do everything I can to answer them,” he said a few minutes later. But “frankly, I think most New Yorkers, particularly those in the middle class in communities like this, they want to talk about the solutions to the challenges that New York City faces. That’s what they care about, and I want to try to provide some answers.”

After about a month of maybes, Weiner officially launched his comeback campaign with a video posted online late Tuesday. However he does when the polls close, he’s certain to add drama to the heated race to succeed term-limited Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Wednesday it would be a “shame” if Weiner were elected mayor.

Speaking to editors at the Syracuse Post-Standard newspaper, the governor, who also leads the state Democratic Party, said that if Weiner won, “Shame on us.”

In New Paltz on Thursday, Cuomo ducked a question about the comment, saying only that he didn’t have an official position on the mayor’s race.

“And I’m going to leave it at that,” he said.

Cuomo spokesman Richard Azzopardi declined to comment.

Weiner, a former councilman and seven-term congressman, ran for mayor in 2005 and nearly did in 2009. He’s getting into this year’s race with a $4.8 million campaign bank account and the possibility of $1 million more in public matching money. A Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday found Weiner getting 15 percent of the Democratic primary vote, behind all other Democratic contenders except City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, with 25 percent.

Outside the subway station Thursday, Smalls said she’d vote for Weiner “because I like the work that he’s done in the past.

“Even though he made a mistake, you know, we’re human. He’s human. He apologized for it, and it’s time to move on,” she said, though she couldn’t resist a wink at his notoriety: “Instead of a hug, I really wanted a text,” she joked.