ANTHONY WEINER has done a dramatic turn about on taxes – at least according to his own words.
He’s pitching a middle-class tax cut now, but just three years ago Weiner reported that members of his congressional district in Queens and Brooklyn weren’t interested in tax cuts.
“No one in my district is asking for tax cuts,” Weiner said in a City Journal article published in the summer of 2002.
Gifford Miller’s campaign pounced on the apparent flip-flop, with spokesman Steve Sigmund zinging, “Apparently, Mr. Weiner thinks that a ‘new idea’ is putting his finger in the political wind and moving in whatever direction it’s blowing at the time.”
Weiner spokesman Anson Kaye retorted, “Anthony Weiner sponsored middle-class tax cuts in Congress and is the only candidate in the race for mayor who has pledged to lower taxes on the middle class, and he’s the only one who will do it as mayor.”
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Despite staking much of her Manhattan borough president run on delivering constituent services, Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz didn’t set foot in her district office for two full years, a former employee charged.
“She did not go to her district office from the spring of 2002 to the spring of 2004 – and that’s not an exaggeration,” a source familiar with Moskowitz’s day-to-day operations at the time said.
Legislators generally perform constituent outreach from their district offices while performing policy duties at their City Hall headquarters.
Moskowitz called the charges “patently false,” adding she spent one or two days a week in the district office during that time period and was physically in her district “constantly.”
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In an effort to show voters that their fund-raising machines are still chugging along, the Democratic mayoral candidates played up how much money they raised, but were quiet about the amounts the campaigns returned to donors.
Aides to C. Virginia Fields told media outlets that she took in slightly more than $59,000 from July 12 to Aug. 11. But that didn’t include the $30,000 she had to return during the same period.
All told, she netted a scant $29,000 for the month, campaign-finance documents show.
Front-running Fernando Ferrer returned $22,000 during the period, while Weiner gave back $11,000 and Miller $5,000.
Campaigns return donations for a variety of reasons, including accidentally exceeding the donor limit, committing technical violations, or discovering the money came from undesirable contributors.