Christine Quinn Leads Mayoral Polls but Remains Vulnerable in a Run-off

THE GUARDIAN

A New York Times/Siena College poll this week confirmed Quinn's position as frontrunner to become the Democratic candidate in November's mayoral election. That in turn makes favourite to replace the current incumbent, Michael Bloomberg, as resident of Gracie Mansion.
A Quinn victory would make her New York's first woman, and lesbian, mayor. On a more political note her mayoralty would mark the return of the Democratic party as the natural leaders of this predominantly liberal city, following almost 20 years of Republican/Independent stewardship under Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg.
In some regards, the tea leaves look good for "Mayor Quinn". Her main rival, Anthony Weiner, has all but combusted into a puff of smoke following the revelation that his digital indiscretions with women were more than a one-off blip. Though Weiner is bucking sense and sticking in the race, his poll numbers are now down to a moribund 10% of Democratic voters in the Siena College poll....

But despite the frontrunner status, Quinn's position remains precarious. With the clock ticking on the Democratic primary election on 10 September, her 25% backing among registered Democratic voters lags far behind the 40% she needs to become her party's outright choice, first time around....

A closer look at the poll figures shows that Weiner's self-implosion has been to the advantage not of Quinn, who has actually fallen three points since Siena's previous poll in July, but of the "two Bills" – Bill Thompson and Bill de Blasio – who are vying for second place if the race goes to a runoff. Thompson has sucked up much of Weiner's declining support, rising five points to 19% in the Siena College poll, while De Blasio has gained three points to 14%.
Quinn's inability to establish a convincing lead over her opponents is partly explained by her reputation, garnered over seven years as speaker of New York City council, for being a career politician who can be abrasive and scheming in her pursuit of power. It is also partly explained by the elephant in the room of this year's mayoral race: Bloomberg.



After more than 11 years in the job, the billionaire has recast the mayoralty very much in his own mould. With his vast fortune, Wall Street confidence, celebrity status and a track record of visionary reforms that have put New York back at the forefront of global cities – the smoking ban, transformation of the waterfront, revitalisation of the city's skyline, bike lanes, a plummeting murder rate, the list goes on – Bloomberg is a formidable act to follow...
Bloomberg's spectral figure looming over the mayoral race is a problem for Quinn, who is caricatured by her opponents as a Mini-Me. Her help relaxing term limits to allow Bloomberg to serve a third term as mayor in 2008 is used as a stick to beat her.

The 2013 race has become to some degree a post-mortem on Bloomberg's era and a referendum on the kind of sparkling, modern but highly unequal city that has emerged under him. Quinn is polling well among households earning more than $100,000 in Manhattan, the Siena College poll shows, but over in the outer boroughs the electorate is unsettled and seething.
As the Nation magazine pointed out about what it dubbed the "gilded city", the richest 1% of New Yorkers now earns 39% of the total city income, up from 27% when Bloomberg became mayor. The population of homeless people during his epoch increased by 61% and, in the most contentious aspect of his reign, largely black and Hispanic people were stopped and frisked on the street some five million times.



Thompson, lost to Bloomberg in the mayoral race four years ago. [N.Y. Times:] His team is telling would-be supporters he will create a modernized Dinkins-like mosaic, carrying still-ardent African-Americans and attracting the ascendant Latino voting bloc, even as he builds a bridge to the city’s corporate crowd. (One example: his measured approach to the polarizing police tactic called stop and frisk. He is proposing to hire 2000 additional police officers. ) By zeroing in on their needs, he has quietly established allies within the Orthodox Jewish community, a prized slice of the electoral pie. He is trying to convince skeptical donors that he has fire in the belly despite a sometimes retiring style. But rather than turning up the energy, lately he has been turning up the volume, shouting zingers and pounding tables. [Guardian, (Cont'd):] As a result he has eaten into Quinn's numbers by drawing 24% support among black voters, above her 18%.

In reply, as Friday's event showed, Quinn has courted the city's large and growing Hispanic community who may make up as many as one in five of the electorate in November. But as they scrap for every last vote, the three remaining serious Democratic candidates in the race know that their coffers are limited.

CARLOS IN DANGER: WEINER DROPS TO 4th IN POLLS. QUINN LEADS

HUFFINGTON POST

Anthony Weiner has dropped from the front of the pack to fourth place in the Democratic primary for New York City's mayoral race, a poll released Monday by Quinnipiac University finds, with voters increasingly viewing his personal history as a legitimate issue in the election.
City Council Speaker Christine Quinn now leads the primary field with 27 percent of likely Democratic voters, with Public Advocate Bill de Blasio and former Comptroller Bill Thompson taking 21 percent and 20 percent, respectively. Weiner, a former congressman, has just 16 percent.
In the last Quinnipiac poll, taken just before he admitted to sending inappropriate messages and lewd photos to women as recently as last summer, Weiner had a 4-point lead over Quinn.
"With six weeks to go, anything can happen, but it looks like former Congressman Anthony Weiner may have sexted himself right out of the race for New York City mayor," said Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.




Consistently strong polling by Quinn, the frontrunner in most surveys, belies her potential vulnerability in a mayoral runoff, to be held if no one candidate gains 40% of the vote. Quinn's net favorability rating has lagged both De Blasio and Thompson, potential runoff opponents. A Quinnipiac poll last week of a hypothetical Democratic runoff between Quinn and Thompson found Thompson out front 51-42.
Monday's poll has Quinn losing a hypothetical runoff against Thompson by 10 points, 50-40.

WEINER LEADS QUINN IN LATEST MAYORAL POLL

WALL STREET JOURNAL

Former U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner captured the frontrunner's mantle in the race for the Democratic mayoral nomination, leading City Council Speaker Christine Quinn for the first time and running neck-and-neck with her in a potential runoff, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC 4 New York/Marist poll.Just two years after a sexting scandal derailed his career, Mr. Weiner garnered 25% of registered Democrats polled, compared with Ms. Quinn, who had 20%, marking her lowest level of support since polling of the race began. Trailing them were former Comptroller Bill Thompson, at 13%, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, 10%, and city Comptroller John Liu, 8%.

Mr. Weiner also has made gains in an all-but-certain runoff election expected to determine the Democratic nominee. In a potential runoff matchup, Ms. Quinn leads Mr. Weiner, 44% to 42%; a month ago, the margin was much wider, with Ms. Quinn winning 48% to 33%.

Nearly half of all registered voters would be willing to vote for [Mr. Weiner] for mayor, and more than half of Democrats view him positively, according to the poll....The survey also demonstrates the toll that months of bruising criticism on the campaign trail have taken on Ms. Quinn, who has been pummeled over issues such as overturning term limits and her alliance with Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Her level of support among Democrats has fallen nearly in half.

 The poll showed all of the major Democrats defeating Messrs.Joseph Lhota or John Catsimatidis in the general election. In one scenario, Ms. Quinn has 52% of registered voters, compared with Mr. Lhota at 15%,

CBS News reported Ms Quinn fared slightly better in a new Quinnipiac University poll. In the survey, 17 percent of respondents voiced support for disgraced former Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., putting him about even with City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and former City Comptroller William Thompson, who have 19 and 16 percent, respectively.

MEANWHILE, IN NYC: MS. QUINN; ALSO INCREASED POVERTY, AND BIKE KIOSKS

NY TIMES

Her mother was dying of breast cancer that had spread to her bones.

Almost every morning, the young Ms. Quinn woke her mother, bathed her, made her breakfast and gave her medication.

Her mother had gone deaf, and said that Christine, her younger daughter, was the only one whose lips she could read. So it was up to her daughter to deliver the worsening medical news the family received in doctors’ offices and hospital rooms, which her mother met with disbelief and sometimes anger.

When the sadness and chaos got to be too much, Ms. Quinn would sneak tubs of ice cream and corn muffins up to her bedroom, eat them in a single sitting, and then make herself throw up. The purging brought a momentary sense of relief to what seemed an out-of-control life.

Ms. Quinn, now speaker of the New York City Council and a Democratic candidate for mayor, kept secretly bingeing and purging for 10 years, as she moved from high school to Trinity College and the beginnings of a political career, until she entered a Florida rehabilitation center at age 26.

“I’m embarrassed about it now still,” Ms. Quinn said during an interview on Friday at her City Hall office. “I wish I could say I wasn’t.”

Now, for the first time, Ms. Quinn is making public her bulimia and the alcoholism that accompanied it. She will speak about her experience on Tuesday at Barnard College, and touch on it in a memoir to be published next month.

Ms. Quinn, 46, contacted The New York Times to tell her story, as her aides try to soften her often rough-edged political image and build a campaign that draws heavily on her personal appeal to women.

She said she had come to believe that “until you stop hiding things, you’re hiding things, and hiding things is not healthy.”

“I just want people to know you can get through stuff,” she added. “I hope people can see that in what my life has been and where it is going.”

Read more at NY TIMES


City Report Shows a Growing Number Are Near Poverty




NY TIMES

The rise in New York City’s poverty rate as a result of the recession has apparently eased, but not before pushing nearly half of the city’s population into the ranks of the poor or near-poor in 2011, according to an analysis by the Bloomberg administration.

That year, according to the city’s measure, about 46 percent of New Yorkers were making less than 150 percent of the poverty threshold, a benchmark used to describe people who are not officially poor but who still struggle to get by. That represents a rise of more than three percentage points since 2009, when the nation’s recession officially ended.

By the city’s definition, a family with two adults and two children could earn $46,416 a year and still fall within 150 percent of the city’s poverty level. Unlike the official but rigid federal poverty level, the city’s measure balances the added value of tax credits, food stamps, rent subsidies and other benefits against expenses like health and day care, housing and commuting that reflect New York’s higher living costs. The city says a two-adult, two-child family is poor if it earns less than $30,949 a year. The federal government sets the level at $22,811.

Though more New Yorkers were working in 2011 than the year before, larger shares of children and working adults were classified as poor in 2011, and the proportions of Asians, noncitizens and Queens residents — overlapping groups — each rose by more than four percentage points since 2008.

Read more at NY TIMES

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 Bike share was easy for New York City to love in the abstract. It was not about adding bike lanes at the expense of something else; it was about sharing something that did not yet exist.

But with the program two weeks away, many New Yorkers have turned against bike share, and for one simple reason: They did not expect it to look like this.

In recent weeks, hundreds of stations have sprouted in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn — empty husks sprawled 30 or 50 spaces long on city sidewalks and streets, anticipating rows of bicycles that will that will soon protrude from the kiosk slots.

The critics say the kiosks are a blight. They clash with the character of residential areas of the West Village or Fort Greene, Brooklyn. They are already magnets for pigeons, garbage bags and dogs in need of relief.

Lawsuits have been prepared. Kiosks have been defaced

Quinn Accused of Being Vindictive, Controlling, Temperamental, With Eruptions of Face-to-Face Wrath

THE MAYORAL WARS:


NY TIMES

Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker, denied... that she had used the power of her office to avenge grievances with elected officials who disagreed with her.

But hours later, two council members said that was not the case, describing episodes when they believed Ms. Quinn, who as speaker controls the Council’s financial accounts, had cut financing from programs in their districts after a political altercation.

Councilman Peter F. Vallone Jr., a Queens Democrat, said that Ms. Quinn, had slashed city contributions to his district and allowed cuts to a college scholarship fund named for his father after the younger Mr. Vallone opposed a proposal by Ms. Quinn to name the Queensboro Bridge for former Mayor Edward I. Koch.

“It was made clear to me in no uncertain terms that there would be retribution for my vote,” Mr. Vallone said in an interview. “No one should ever be punished for representing the voices of the people who elected them.”

Councilwoman Elizabeth S. Crowley, another Queens Democrat, said Ms. Quinn cut financing for youth programs and senior centers in her district in 2010 after her office issued a news release about local firehouses, before budget negotiations were finished, that failed to credit the speaker.

“It was so brazenly vindictive, I don’t know what else to call it,” Ms. Crowley said. The councilwoman acknowledged that she had erred by sending out a premature and unauthorized news
release, but said Ms. Quinn’s response was inappropriate.
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[A second article (below) in the NY TIMES added this : Asked about the episode last week, Ms. Quinn said that Ms. Crowley had committed “a completely inappropriate, attention-grabbing act” and violated Council protocol. “She was told it was not acceptable, and I did not mince words in telling her that,” she said.

Did Ms. Crowley have her funding cut as a punishment? “It is what happened that year,” Ms. Quinn replied.

Pressed on whether the move was an act of retaliation, Ms. Quinn just smiled: “It is what happened that year,” she said again, signaling that the matter was closed. ]

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Ms. Quinn, as speaker, has wide discretion to distribute an annual pot of Council funds — worth nearly $400 million last year, according to the Independent Budget Office — among the 51 council members. The ability of legislative leaders to reward allies and punish critics is not unique to the Council speaker; powerful lawmakers in Albany and Washington have long used their positions to withhold any number of perks, like grant-making power, office space and committee assignments, to maintain discipline.

Ms. Quinn’s spokesman, Jamie McShane, denied that the speaker had punished Mr. Vallone, saying there were other council members who opposed the bridge renaming but did not see changes in their district funding.

Ms. Quinn, in [a] television interview, said her toughness was an asset in managing a Council that, before her speakership, had been seen as unruly.

“I’ve tried very hard to bring discipline to the City Council, which was for many, many years kind of known as an undisciplined body, without focus,” said Ms. Quinn, who was elected speaker in 2006. She described steps she had taken to bring more order to the Council, including scheduling regular caucus meetings and “asking people to comment when they are supposed to comment, not comment when they are not supposed to comment.”

NY TIMES

A session of the New York City Council had descended into chaos, and lawmakers were openly questioning her leadership. Ms. Quinn, the Council speaker, decided there was one person to blame: Betsy Gotbaum, then the city’s public advocate, who had been presiding.

The response was sudden and fierce. Ms. Quinn summoned Ms. Gotbaum to an office nearby and, with little warning, began shouting at her in increasingly angry tones about appearing weak in front of other lawmakers.

You were like Bambi in there!” Ms. Quinn exclaimed, slamming her hand on a table for emphasis, according to Ms. Gotbaum, who was on crutches at the time.

Ms. Gotbaum was stunned. “I didn’t merit that kind of unprofessional behavior,” she said recently.

 

As she pursues a high-profile bid for mayor, Ms. Quinn, a Democrat, has proudly promoted her boisterous personality, hoping that voters will embrace her blend of brashness and personal charm.

But in private, friends and colleagues say, another Ms. Quinn can emerge: controlling, temperamental and surprisingly volatile, with a habit of hair-trigger eruptions of unchecked, face-to-face wrath.

She has threatened, repeatedly, to slice off the private parts of those who cross her.

She is sensitive to slights: When a Queens councilwoman neglected to credit Ms. Quinn in a news release, the speaker retaliated by cutting money for programs in her district.

Ms. Quinn’s staff, concerned that angry tirades could be overheard by outsiders, added soundproofing to her City Hall office. Wary of her temper, they are known to ask one another: “Did she throw up on you today?”

 

Ms. Quinn is by no means the first hotheaded politician in New York — Fiorello H. La Guardia and Rudolph W. Giuliani, both former mayors, were famed for their outbursts.

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In an interview last week, Ms. Quinn readily acknowledged her angry moments.

“I don’t think being pushy or bitchy or tough, or however you want to characterize it, is a bad thing,” she said. “New Yorkers want somebody who’s going to get things done.”

“Sometimes I yell, sometimes I raise my voice,” she added. “I am trying to do it less, because it’s not always attractive. It’s not always the right thing to do.”

A former housing activist, Ms. Quinn is an adept practitioner of the arts of municipal power, unrelenting in her negotiations and not afraid to intimidate. Her supporters say she has brought much-needed discipline to a Council once dismissed as ungovernable, hammering out useful legislation and calming relations with the mayor.

More than two dozen current and former city officials, lobbyists and political operatives recounted being berated by Ms. Quinn, but few would speak for the record, citing a fear of retaliation. They offered nearly identical accounts of their altercations, describing a rapid escalation of voice and vitriol, occasionally laced with vulgarity.

“Her eyes get really wide, she points her fingers,” one official said. “She gets really close to you. It’s really in your face.”

A former campaign donor who had been called to Ms. Quinn’s office to discuss a legislative proposal said: “She screamed at me for 10 minutes, uninterrupted, and used the ‘F’-word at least 20 times. I was just so startled, I didn’t know what to do.”

On telephone calls, Ms. Quinn can begin unexpected diatribes, her voice growing so loud that callers often have to hold their phones away from their ears.

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Ms. Quinn, who often publicly pokes fun at her own brassiness, is fully aware of her aggressive tendencies, once bragging in an interview that she could “open up the bitch tap and let the water run.” In an e-mail exchange with advocates, Ms. Quinn once offered a wry self-description: “control freak! Lol.”
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In caucus meetings, Ms. Quinn is perceived by lawmakers as aloof and dismissive, rarely looking up from her BlackBerry and loudly cutting off council members who try to raise concerns about pending bills.

At the end of meetings, Ms. Quinn asks, “Any other issues?” She does not wait for the answer before ducking out of the room, adding, “Bye!”

 

Even those subjected to a Quinn dressing-down say that, in happier times, the speaker is also unusually adept at turning on the charm. Her anger can be followed by bursts of ingratiating sweetness.

Colleagues recall telephone calls on birthdays and cheek-kisses at public functions, only days after a high-decibel shouting session. And the members of her staff are strikingly loyal, with close advisers staying by her side for years.

The yo-yo effect, colleagues and advocates say, is disconcerting, leading them to wonder if Ms. Quinn’s tantrums are a calculated tool to maintain order, or the byproduct of a stormy temperament that even her staff is helpless to soothe.