SAN FRANCISCO — Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene calls him a “communist groomer.”
Elon Musk says he’s a “pedophile apologist.”
Senator Ted Cruz once said of the state senator: “I thought this guy was thrown out of Congress for sending naked pictures of himself?”—intentionally confusing Scott Wiener with disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner.
And yet.
In the race to replace Rep. Nancy Pelosi—who announced last month that she would retire after nearly 40 years of representing San Francisco in Washington—Wiener is arguably the less radical of the two leading candidates.
Wiener’s main opponent is 39-year-old Saikat Chakrabarti. (When we met, Wiener corrected my pronunciation of Chakrabarti’s name: “It’s Shoy-kat, not Sai-kat.”) Chakrabarti is the former chief of staff to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a co-founder of the progressive political action committee Justice Democrats.
