Anthony Weiner intern reveals why she, fellows joined New York mayoral campaign

My reasons for joining Anthony Weiner‘s mayoral campaign were not complicated.

Since high school, I had interned for political campaigns in New Jersey. One morning, several of my friends sent me links to the same online ad for the Weiner campaign, seeking applications for internships.

They thought it would be educational and entertaining.

How right they were.

My education began very quickly.

“I’m here because of Huma,” Clay Adam Wade, a junior staffer, explained to me.

The sentiment was repeated to me again by some fellow interns.

Their hope was to make a connection with Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, and thus forge a potential connection to her longtime boss, Hillary Clinton, to get an inside track for a campaign position if she ran for president in 2016.

This is how Clay explained it to me:

“I had followed Anthony’s career for a few years pre-scandal, and when the opportunity came up I decided to apply to work on his second bid for mayor,” he said. “After having started working on the campaign, while still committed to his cause, my motive began to change.”

He continued, “I thought if I could only ride this out to the very end, perhaps I could network with Ms. Abedin and, in a few years, secure myself a spot in Secretary Clinton’s all-but-certain bid for the presidency. It was a-once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

Truth is, in the month I was there, Huma was rarely seen around the office.

Obviously, not everyone joined the campaign to make a Clinton connection. Some were drawn to Weiner’s qualifications as a potential mayor.

He is “bright, innovative, impassioned and incredibly in touch with the city in which he was raised,” one told me.

The question of what they are all doing there now has been on many people’s minds after the revelations last week about things everybody thought had already been fully revealed.

Who would work on a campaign like this?

It has been reported that Weiner had difficulty hiring veteran operatives. His choice of a campaign manager led to the headline, “Weiner Said to Hire Relative Unknown to Run Mayoral Campaign.” His communications director last worked as the press secretary for the New Jersey state education commissioner.

There were a lot of short résumés around the office.

The candidate sometimes seemed inexperienced, too.

There was the time when he called his 20 interns into a cramped office, and boasted that if we told him our names and one fact about ourselves, he could correctly identify all of us. He went around the room, then went back to the first intern, and tried to remember her name.

“Monica,” he said. No, it was Stephanie.

Then he called me “Monica.” Wrong again.

He got the next three interns’ names wrong, and then called the whole thing off.

Last week, I am told, some people on the staff were wondering why he hadn’t called the campaign off.

I left after a month to begin taking summer classes.

I know one staff member who quit because, he told me, he was paid less than a third of what he had been promised.

A lot of people in the office are probably thinking they only got a fraction of what they were promised, too.

Olivia Nuzzi is a college student and a writer for NSFWCORP, a magazine and website.