New York - Disgraced former US congressman Anthony Weiner insisted on Monday that he's not giving up his bid to become New York mayor despite a sexting scandal that has decimated his poll ratings.
“I'm going to fight. I'm going to stand up strong,” said Weiner at an after-work talk in a midtown Manhattan sports bar organised by the news website BuzzFeed.com.
Weiner, 48, a Brooklyn native, Democrat and one-time city councillor, had been looking to the race to succeed outgoing Mayor Michael Bloomberg as his political comeback.
He quit the House of Representatives in 2011 after confessing that he used social media to send sexually explicit pictures of himself to a number of women, both before and during his marriage.
His sexting problems returned in July this year when it emerged that he had continued to send explicit photos to at least three women after he left Congress, using the alias Carlos Danger.
Weiner received little applause from the room full of twenty-something hipsters, both male and female, when he stepped on stage to chat with BuzzFeed.com editor-in-chief Ben Smith.
He acknowledged that media coverage of his campaign has been “fairly brutal”, but added that nobody was to blame for his conduct but himself.
“The fact of the matter is (that) substance in politics doesn't get covered in a campaign like this,” he lamented.
He added: “Citizens want mayors who have actual ideas for what they want to do.”
Weiner styled himself as a candidate who threatens the establishment with an alternative to business-as-usual at City Hall, and faulted multicultural New York for not capitalising more on its rich linguistic diversity, saying: “We could be the call centre of the world.”
In an opinion poll released earlier on Monday, three out of four New Yorkers viewed Weiner unfavourably, and 62 percent thought the national attention surrounding his sexting was embarrassing - compared to eight percent who considered it “entertaining”.
Undaunted, he released his first TV ad of the campaign on Monday, aimed at the teeming city's financially strapped middle class.
Christine Quinn, the openly gay speaker of the New York city council, is the frontrunner among Democratic mayoral candidates ahead of the September 10 primaries and the decisive election on November 5. - AFP