How Not To Handle A Crisis

Weiner can run for mayor all he wants - with this kind of handling of questions over his Twitter escapades, he won't place in the top two:

He’s had two years to think about his political comeback, but former Rep. Anthony Weiner has bungled his return to public life after his sexting scandal, experts in crisis management said Thursday.

They faulted Weiner’s performance in a whirlwind of TV interviews Wednesday when the former congressman could not say how many women received raunchy texts and photos from him or rule out the possibility that more photos could emerge.

Weiner’s less-than-artful dodge — which included nervous laughter in one interview — left an impression he might be hiding something, the crisis managers said, adding they were surprised he did not have a better game plan for answering obvious and inevitable questions about the scandal.

One of the No.1 rules of crisis management is, ‘Do you have all of the correct information, and is more coming out that is going to make it worse?’” said Montieth Illingworth, of Montieth & Company. 

In one of his interviews on Wednesday, with RNN, a regional cable news channel, Weiner said, “If reporters want to go try to find more, I can’t say that they’re not going to be able to find another picture or find another ... person.”

Illingworth said, "Clearly there is a remaining messiness to the story.”

Azi Paybarah at Capital NY agreed:

Asked whether there aren't more revelations about his behavior to come, Weiner has essentially responded by telling his interviewers, and the rest of the media, to move on. (Funny strategy, for a guy who's supposed to have such great "media chops," and who arguably ought to know better by now what happens when you try to tell reporters what they're not allowed to talk about anymore.)

Weiner should not run if the scandal has not run its course.

And clearly the scandal has not run its course if he's telling the media there may be more photos of his penis out there if they go looking for them.

That's like telling a jonesing alcoholic there's booze out there somewhere if they just look for it.

You can bet the press will be looking for the additional photos and the women who recieved those photos.

Paybarah tells us that Weiner wants to run an issue-focuses campaign of substance.

He notes that while Weiner is giving interviews about the Twitter mess, the rest of the candidates are doing just that:

Meanwhile, the declared Democratic candidates for mayor have been participating in the sort of substantive conversation Weiner has been calling for, coming together last night at John Jay College for a NY1 debate on public safety. The highlight there, in policy terms, was probably a disagreement between Christine Quinn and Bill de Blasio over a bill allowing New Yorkers who feel they were racially profiled by the police to sue in state court.

I emailed Weiner last night for his reaction to the debate. He didn't respond.

Maybe he was too busy getting his new Twitter account ready to respond.

At any rate, it's quite clear that Weiner 2.0 isn't any different than Weiner 1.0 and he's got lots of internal, personal work to do before he's ready to emerge back into public life.