Long before Scott Wiener became California's leading housing iconoclast or a regular target for scathing Fox News diatribes, he was an introverted New Jersey teen with enviable choices for college.
Two options, Columbia University in New York and the University of Chicago, seemed tailor-made for Wiener, the kind of places where a studious closeted Jewish kid would blend in.
Instead, some inexplicable impulse — "the energetic forces of the world," he surmised on a recent Sunday walking through the Castro, his longtime San Francisco neighborhood — drew him to Duke University in North Carolina, precisely because it wasn't a natural fit.
"I realized I was meant to go to Duke because, I mean, it's a good school, but it was also really social," he explained. Somewhere in his subconscious, he wanted to force himself to be social too.
Consciously or not, Wiener is most comfortable seeking out the path of most resistance. His 13-year career in elected office can be viewed as a one-man experiment: How far can a politician go when he pushes all the boundaries at once?
The typical politician starting his career in local government would probably not take on reforming the city's nudity law, particularly if his last name lends itself to cringeworthy puns. Or decide hours after barely winning a state Senate seat to take on a sacrosanct tenet of California housing policy in his first bill. Or, in the face of an onslaught of death threats, continue to spar online with right-wing...
Over the last year, beyond traditional healthcare and federal procurement matters, the government has pursued federal False Claims Act (FCA) investigations and enforcement across high-risk areas, i...