City Council Speaker Tries to Move Out of Bloomberg's Shadow (Well, I never expected to see this)

NYC

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A few weeks before Election Day, Christine C. Quinn, the speaker of the New York City Council, met with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg at a diner in Manhattan.

Ms. Quinn had not yet taken sides in the mayor’s race, snubbing the Democratic nominee, William C. Thompson Jr., infuriating some of her colleagues who viewed her as too cozy with the mayor.

Over coffee, Mr. Bloomberg assured Ms. Quinn that it would be all right with him if she endorsed his rival. “Do what you have to do,” the mayor told her, according to two aides who summarized the conversation.

Soon after, she did, halfheartedly endorsing Mr. Thompson, in a move that quieted critics and all but guaranteed her re-election as speaker when the Council meets on Wednesday.

Ms. Quinn declined to discuss the conversation. But the story encapsulates her complicated relationship with Mr. Bloomberg: even as she was publicly declaring her preference for his rival, she first received the mayor’s blessing.

Now, as Mr. Bloomberg’s once shiny political brand is losing luster, Ms. Quinn confronts a thorny question: can she thrive on her own?

The question has taken on new urgency for Ms. Quinn, who aspires to be mayor, as she attempts to lead a suddenly rambunctious City Council at a time when a new class of political leaders, including Public Advocate Bill de Blasio and Mr. Thompson, have emerged.

In a city where each new mayor seems to be a jarring break from the last (the garrulous Koch begot the reserved Dinkins, paving the way for the imperious Giuliani), Ms. Quinn “has to set herself up as distinct from Mayor Bloomberg,” said Andrew White, director of the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School. “And that means breaking with the mayor, certainly more than she has in the past.”

There are already signs that she is recalibrating a relationship with the mayor that helped cement her transformation from left-wing housing activist into a citywide political force.

Since the Nov. 3 election, she has allowed the Council to override two mayoral vetoes — on a plan to ease parking restrictions and building a giant mall in the Bronx — dealing Mr. Bloomberg a series of very public defeats.

She just unveiled a wide-ranging plan to coordinate the city’s food policies, calling the mayor’s policies to date “piecemeal.” And those close to Ms. Quinn said she was busily drawing up similarly ambitious plans, for housing and job creation, to be unveiled over the next year, with or without the mayor’s support.

Aides point out that the past four years have been filled with accomplishment. She was an architect of the city’s campaign finance overhaul, successfully pushed for conversion of unsold condominiums to affordable housing, restored money for a police cadet training class, and was a highly visible advocate in Albany for same-sex marriage, drawing on the difficulty she and her partner have faced as they seek equal status as a couple.

Still, during an interview, the delicacy of her relationship with Mr. Bloomberg was apparent, as she denied that she was distancing herself from him even as she outlined her own expansive agenda for the coming term.

To her, criticism suggesting she is too deferential with the mayor stems from a misunderstanding of how government works, or at least should work. “I could wake up four years from now and have a stack of headlines and highly quotable sayings about zingers to the mayor,” she said. “Or I could wake up four years from now and have actually gotten things done. Now, sometimes those two things will overlap.”

The connections between the two, however, extend beyond policy. She shares an influential political consultant, Josh Isay, with Mr. Bloomberg. Her chief of staff and closest political confidante, Maura Keaney, left her employ to help run the mayor’s campaign last year, as did one of her press aides.

Until now, there seemed to be little downside in working closely with the billionaire mayor. But the city’s political landscape has changed significantly.

The results of the November election — Mr. Bloomberg’s $102 million campaign prevailed, by less than five percentage points — served as a rebuke of a mayoralty with which she has become synonymous, on issues like congestion pricing, the smoking ban, the environment and, especially, the undoing of term limits.

In her own district, where anger over the term limits issue ran high, she received a humbling 52 percent of the Democratic primary vote, well ahead of her nearest rival but less than impressive for an incumbent speaker of the Council.

On primary day, at least five voters approached Ms. Quinn to tell her that they loved her, wished her well and predicted she would win, but could not vote for her because of her decision to help the mayor undo term limits. An even greater threat still looms: two of the speaker’s biggest skeptics, Mr. de Blasio and John C. Liu, the city’s new comptroller, have won citywide office, giving them a powerful platform.

Mr. Liu, a fellow Democrat and possible mayoral rival, has not hesitated to question Ms. Quinn. Discussing her reluctant, late-in-the-election endorsement of Mr. Thompson, Mr. Liu said recently that it had hurt her credibility within the party.

Mr. de Blasio has vowed to play a bigger role than his predecessor in Council proceedings, sitting in on committee meetings and introducing legislation, an often-ignored prerogative of the office.

Leroy G. Comrie Jr., a councilman from Queens, said that Mr. Liu and Mr. de Blasio “will be out there doing everything they can to establish themselves as effective counterweights to the mayor.”

Ms. Quinn “has to figure out how to fit into that,” he said.

Ms. Quinn has at times picked fights with the mayor and won, often behind the scenes. In the past year, she blocked his plans for a surcharge on all clothing, persuading him to limit it to purchases above $100, to spare low-income shoppers; fought his proposal to impose a 5-cent tax on plastic bags, arguing it was a tax increase, not a meaningful environmental measure; and stymied his effort to withhold rebate checks to homeowners.

But her tenure as speaker remains the polar opposite of her predecessor, Gifford Miller, an ardent Bloomberg foe who seemed to relish public squabbles with the new mayor.

It may be tempting for Ms. Quinn to preserve the status quo. Offending Mr. Bloomberg would most likely mean alienating his powerful network of wealthy friends, many of whom represent the Democratic party’s biggest donors, like the financier Steven Rattner, and the cosmetics heir Leonard A. Lauder. Ms. Quinn has carefully cultivated ties to that world, seemingly becoming the mayor’s heir apparent in the process.

Kathryn S. Wylde, the president of the Partnership for New York City, which represents business leaders, put it this way: “The way she has handled the speakership, and issues that are important to the business community, make her a favored candidate to succeed the mayor.”

But such support cuts both ways. It could aid her in a mayoral run in 2013, but it will fuel a central line of attack against her: that she is nothing more than Bloomberg-lite.

She seems eager to leave her mark on a second term as speaker, which she never expected to have because of term limits. She described it as a gift. “I don’t want to waste it,” she said.

Ms. Quinn, who put aside her own plans to run for mayor when Mr. Bloomberg sought a third term, has about $3 million in her campaign coffers, making her a strong contender for his office in 2013.

She refuses to discuss that possibility, saying that she is focused on a second term as speaker. But the issue is never far from her mind.

“Would I like to go on in public life to greater heights?” she asked herself during an interview. “Of course I would.”