Weiner Foiled.

Congressman Anthony Weiner’s attempts to extricate himself from last weekend’s lewd Twitter feed mess are starting to make the most ardent public affairs voyeurs uncomfortable. Media Bistro will use this in crisis communications seminars for years as a case study in what not to do in the crunch.

Weiner, a cable news favorite and practiced performer, had to have shivered when he saw that the New York Post, for example, had seven reporters covering Weinergate on Tuesday. That was the day the surly New York Democrat had a come apart when he met the press outside his office.  If a Republican refused to answer simple questions in the manner adopted by Weiner, the Queens congressman would be ridiculing him without mercy.  That remains one of the fundamental problems Weiner faces in trying to defuse this career-wrecking threat.  He has no foil. Weiner is a bully.  Whether it’s a reporter, anchor, or partisan adversary, Weiner needs someone to attack and mock. That’s the essential element of his act.  He tried it on Tuesday by getting ugly with CNN, providing viewers with a stark look of a media strategy failure by someone regarded as a pro.

On Wednesday, Weiner, who after declaring he would stop talking about the hacking/prank/ruinous mistake, tried a display of sweet reason in a round of interviews and holed himself below the waterline with the mind boggling claim that he didn’t know if that’s him in the photo.  Weiner subdued is a part he has not played in his media career, and it showed. He is his own foil in this instance and that can be confusing for the most practiced performer.

Weiner has showcased the sound and look of the typical center of a scandal player.  He began as a victim, moved quickly into the poohing-poohing stage, and now seeks shelter in the incomprehensible.

What he does know is what else is out there, and that must be frightening Weiner.  In stories of this sort, the man in the center of it knows what he’s done.  What he cannot be sure of is who else knows the whole story or important pieces of it.  He must creep around the facts and calibrate his responses to what appear to the rest of us as logical, harmless (even helpful) questions. There lies Weiner’s special torment.  A congressman who keeps in touch with a porn star on Twitter probably did not make a community college journalism student 3,000 miles away the first recipient of his lascivious photo.

Weiner may stop talking, but that won’t be enough to silence others who may keep the creepy story going until it ends in tears.