GUESTS
Bryan Wachter, Vice President, Retail Association of Nevada
Maggie McLetchie, Attorney, Las Vegas
Former Congressman Anthony Weiner, alias Carlos Danger, has practically derailed his political comeback with revelations that he continued sexting women even after the first round of this scandal. Should it matter? Here's what our panelists had to say:
Maggie McLetchie:
Frankly, I don’t really want to hear about Anthony Weiner’s sexting to anybody. And I’m the type of person who generally wouldn’t care what our elected officials do in their private lives. In my opinion it doesn’t really make a difference in terms of what they can do in office. My concern is, he already stepped down from Congress and cost the people of new York a special election because of this before. Suddenly he wants to re-engage in politics. He should never have stepped down in the first place if this wasn’t going to affect his ability to run. And my other concern is I’m not personally intersterested in hearing abut it, I’m certainly not interested in seeing any of the pictures. I do think it becomes a problem if it’s a distraction. And more importantly, he lied about it, and that’s the bigger concern than that it actually happened. I’m not interested in the details of his marriage, I’m not interested in the details of his online sex life, I’m just concerned that he lied about it, and he’s already cost the people in New York a special election.
Bryan Wachter:
I’m not sure that he thought it was going to be as big of an issue. I think I remember when he first announced that he was entering politics again, that he wanted to run for mayor. He said there might be more tweets out there, there might be more pictures, you could possibly find them, I don’t know. So I think he entered the race knowing that they existed, knowing that they were there, knowing that they were going to come out. I think he sort of tried to inoculate himself from those sorts of issues. I would normally agree with Maggie on the personal lives of politicians. I think there’s a caveat to that, which is if you hold yourself up as a moral leader, or you hold yourself up as ‘I am made of glass and I don’t do these things.’ In this case, I don’t think Anthony ever did, but in general. In general if you engage in that activity, I think that makes it worse.