Dee Dee Myers: I wish the Weiner story would go away
Updated 7:05 p.m.
(CBS News) Former Clinton White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers said Sunday she suspects Bill and Hillary Clinton "like many of us, would like to see" the Anthony Weiner scandal "go away."
Myers clarified comments she made earlier Sunday on "Face the Nation" in which she said, "this isn't a story that anybody, particularly the Clintons, are happy to see splashed over the front pages and all over the news relentlessly, and I think they as much as anyone would like to see this go away."
Sunday evening, Myers emailed: "This morning, I may have seemed to suggest that President and Secretary Clinton wanted to Anthony Weiner to drop out of the New York mayor's race. I haven't spoken to either of them about the situation and should have chosen my words my more carefully. All I meant to say is that I suspect that they, like many of us, would like to see the whole story go away."
On "Face the Nation," Myers said by entering and staying in the race despite revelations of more and more inappropriate online relationships, Weiner has "played voters for fools" and turned the race into "a bit of a circus." The Washington Post's Michael Gerson agreed that while "Americans are generally forgiving about sex and politics," they're right to be concerned about a scandal involving "sex plus compulsion, sex plus misogyny."
"This is a case - this is a scandal - a future scandal waiting to happen in the case of New York, and it would seriously undermine his ability to govern," Gerson said. "If he has a serious addiction, like a pain killer addiction... no doctor would recommend a campaign for mayor. You have to take that seriously and he's not taking it seriously."
The problem, Myers said, is that "the one person who doesn't see or recognize the problem is Anthony Weiner."
For Weiner's wife, longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin, the disgraced former congressman's endless "sexting" scandal is "not a comparable situation in a lot of ways to what I think Hillary Clinton went through" during her husband's White House affair, Myers argued.
Weiner's beleaguered campaign suffered another blow Saturday, when his campaign manager called it quits. But he's insisted he'll press on, wagering that his take on the issues will outweigh his personal life.
"You can't say, 'I'm not really better but I want to be mayor anyway,'" she said. "He says, 'I don't have a problem; I don't have an addiction.' An intervention might be the appropriate step, but the voters are saying, 'You've got a problem, and our intervention is going to be to make sure you don't get elected.'"
