No one wants to hold a press conference (and insanely gratuitous subsequent Q&A!) on the subject of his or her errant sexual proclivities, so it is understandable that Anthony Weiner appeared deeply uncomfortable at yesterday’s sext-splanatory seminar. That said: the question of why Weiner wants to be mayor—a question that has, from the start, smothered his campaign like gray cotton briefs restraining an eager, erect penis—was unavoidable during yesterday’s proceedings. Wearily foretelling dick pics to come, the candidate looked as if he would have rather been on a beach, or even just at home taking a nap, than facing down a bunch of smirking reporters who all know he recently told a complete stranger, “God I want to take u from behind in front of a mirror.”

In a New York magazine half-cover story titled “Does Anthony Weiner Even Want to Be Mayor?” Mark Jacobson addressed this very question: “For all the endless talk of Weiner’s narcissism, it was easy to see the mayor’s race a whole other way: He was doing it for her. If Huma [Abedin] was willing to forgive him, what choice would the voters have but to do likewise?” All due respect to Jacobson, we would argue that this is the exact incorrect question to ask. The correct question is: what on Earth would make voters think that the better-than-it-used-to-be status of a candidate’s marriage qualifies a candidate to run a city?

Enter: Abedin.

Since Weiner threw his novelty penis-shaped hat into the ring back in May, the press has quietly, carefully suggested his candidacy is not just evidence of Abedin’s forgiveness—rather, it’s the means of his earning her forgiveness. The New York Timescharacterized Abedin as “eager to end a difficult period of social exile” and “a main architect of her husband’s rehabilitative journey, shaping his calculated comeback.”

Knowing this, we can assume that Weiner did not force her to participate in yesterday’s press conference and that she did so of her own free will. (Frankly, it’s impossible to imagine the sweaty, crazy-eyed Weiner of yesterday sustaining a coherent point for long enough to convince anyone of anything.) Soon after the presser concluded, we remarked that Abedin’s decision to speak was a bad idea, as it established a precedent of her joining him in every subsequent philandering-related press conference.

A day later, we have come to understand it as not just a bad idea, but the bad idea of a political operator whose thinking has gotten sloppy. With a clearer, cooler head, Abedin could have seen the following reaction coming from a mile away: “I feel sorry for her. But she’s complicit too, an enabler or whatever you want to call it. . . It’s the Twilight Zone. It’sOz. It’s fucking crazy,” professor of political science Doug Muzzio told Politico.

“Complicit” because she herself seems to have subscribed to the (rapidly disappearing) popular thinking that her endorsement is the only one that matters. In an astoundingly ill-timed essay in Bazaar, Abedin explains her active role in the campaign thusly: “New Yorkers will have to decide for themselves whether or not to give him a second chance. I had to make that same decision for myself, for my son, for our family. And I know in my heart that I made the right one.” Weiner’s behavior is not an issue of morality, or whether he’s a good husband, or whether porn/sex is icky—it’s a issue about his debilitatingly self-destructive impulses and whether this is a person that should be making decisions that affect eight million people.

But with every conflation of their marriage and the mayoralty, Abedin is contradicting herself, implicitly arguing that New Yorkers do not get “to decide for themselves whether or not to give him a second chance.” As she put it yesterday: “I do strongly believe that that is between us and our marriage.” Abedin has decided for New Yorkers, and she has declared Weiner fit for office. Disagree with her? Awful presumptuous of you to think you can judge a couple’s marriage from the outside!

When Abedin continually and knowingly frames the race in terms of Weiner’s private reformation, she is very explicitly excluding the public from the conversation. The question of whether to vote for Weiner has become a question of whether to trust his wife’s judgment. Your judgment is a nonissue.