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.”

Success of NYC Mayor Bloomberg's 2nd term questionable as he heads into next 4 ...

NYC

NEW YORK (AP) — Mayor Michael Bloomberg wraps up his second term this week, a sophomore effort that will be known for fewer splashy successes and more failures than his first four years as a politically untested businessman.

After the billionaire former CEO first entered office in 2002, he banned smoking in bars and restaurants, won control of the troubled city school system and reversed the post-9/11 fiscal slump. He was re-elected in 2005 by a landslide, even while running as a Republican in this Democratic town.

But Bloomberg's next four years were not as easy, and some New Yorkers became resentful of his missteps and priorities, including his presidential aspirations that smoldered for more than half his term before burning out in 2008.

On Friday, the 67-year-old mayor will be sworn in for another four years, and he will face a new class of Democratic leaders in citywide posts, which could make his next term even more difficult.

"The goodwill has, in many ways, evaporated," said Kenneth Sherrill, a political science professor at Hunter College. "If you make decisions, you make enemies, and after eight years of making decisions, there are a lot of disgruntled stakeholders."

To be fair, Bloomberg had plenty of second-term achievements.

He rezoned dozens of neighborhoods covering thousands of city blocks — a reinvention of the city not seen since the 1960s. He outlawed trans-fats in restaurant food and forced chain restaurants to post calorie counts on menus.

In schools, crime is down, the graduation rate slightly improved and students made some gains on state tests. Bloomberg also persuaded the state Legislature to give him control of the 1.1-million student school system rather than hand it back to a Board of Education model.

The decline in city crime that began in the 1990s continued, despite predictions of a recession-related surge. This year, the city is on track to have its fewest murders since comparable record-keeping began in the 1960s.

Bloomberg also managed to retain control of the office by first orchestrating a change to the two-term limit so that he could run again.

But the mayor has had many second-term setbacks.

The founder of financial information company Bloomberg LP garnered a whopping re-election victory. But shortly after his inauguration, the death of a 7-year-old girl brought close scrutiny of him and the child services agency.

Nixzmary Brown was tortured and beaten to death by her stepfather. Officials said she might not have died if the child welfare caseworkers involved in her case had acted more quickly in investigating suspected abuse when concerns were raised months earlier.

In winter 2006, the mayor vehemently denied an interest in running for president while his associates whispered otherwise. By spring, the mayor's operatives had begun to plant the seeds for a campaign.

He spoke out on national issues and found reasons to travel to presidential swing states. He changed his party registration from Republican to independent, while he had a team of people examine how he could get on the ballot as a third-party candidate.

"The fact that they were concentrating so much on this sideshow presidential campaign — it had to take away attention from day-to-day operations," said Doug Muzzio, public affairs professor at Baruch College.

By summer 2006, his reputation for handling crises smoothly during his first term — including a transit strike, a citywide blackout and the shooting of a councilman inside City Hall — risked being hurt by his response to a weeklong blackout in Queens.

Critics said the mayor should have come to the neighborhoods sooner than he did. But Bloomberg's aides said he was focused on preventing wider outages and had misinformation about the size of the blackout.

Throughout his second term, the mayor was embarrassed by problems among some city agencies.

In 2007, two firefighters died in a blaze at a condemned asbestos-filled building being dismantled at the World Trade Center site. It revealed the Fire Department was failing to inspect many construction sites and uncovered communications lapses between many agencies.

After two fatal crane accidents and several other construction deaths in 2008, Bloomberg admitted he was not satisfied with the agency, and his buildings commissioner resigned.

The mayor also had a number of policy disappointments.

While he set a goal of reducing the city's homeless population by two-thirds by 2009, the number of those in shelters reached an all-time high of more than 39,000, some 3,000 more than when he took office.

He failed to persuade the state Legislature to sign onto his plan to raise money for mass transit by making Manhattan's most congested streets essentially toll roads.

In addition, his administration gave up a plan to force the city's taxi fleet to go entirely hybrid by 2012, after taxi drivers and advocates sued in federal court.

The jet-setting mayor, who has homes in Colorado, Florida, Bermuda, London and upstate New York, has also had to contend with questions about how his own energy use isn't environmentally friendly.

He ordered his drivers to stop leaving the engines running in his SUVs after The Associated Press found them idling all over the city, sometimes for more than an hour.

Bloomberg insisted last week that he has learned from experience and that his second term was better than his first. He predicted his third term "will be even easier."