I think we have to change that policy.
Betsy Combier
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| Christine Quinn |
Quinn Reversal, Meant to Help Her, Now Hurts
By MICHAEL BARBARO and DAVID M. HALBFINGER
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There was no wiggle room. No equivocation.
On a December day in 2007, Christine C. Quinn, the speaker of the City Council, called herself utterly immovable on the question of overturning New York’s term limits law.
“I am today taking a firm and final position,” she declared. “I will not support the repeal or change of term limits through any mechanism, and I will oppose aggressively any attempt by anyone to make any changes in the term limits law.”
The next 314 days turned an implacable opponent of tossing out the law into a primary architect of its dismantling.
It is an about-face that haunts her still.
An angry public has viewed Ms. Quinn’s decision to undo the law as a back-room deal — a simple tit-for-tat that guaranteed Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg a third term in exchange for his blessing for her own eventual bid for City Hall.
But a close-in examination suggests that her reversal was an act more of self-preservation than of favor-trading, driven by intersecting motivations: avoiding the wrath of term-limited Council members who could undermine her speakership, distancing herself from an embarrassing scandal over City Council budgeting that had damaged her own mayoral prospects and, above all, protecting a political identity that hinged on a working partnership with the popular Mr. Bloomberg.
The year it unfolded, 2008, brought two political shocks that altered the course of both of their careers. Mr. Bloomberg, after flirting with a presidential candidacy as an independent, realized that the White House would never be his and turned his gaze back to New York City. Ms. Quinn, a Democrat who was the first woman to be Council speaker and who was just building a name beyond her West Village district, faced a federal inquiry into her office’s oversight of millions of dollars in taxpayers’ money.
Mr. Bloomberg’s needs drove what happened next. After the mayor decided he wanted another four years in City Hall, his aides expected Ms. Quinn to get it done, treating her almost as an afterthought. They assured Mr. Bloomberg, aides said in interviews, that she would abandon her own plan to run for mayor in 2009 and push through legislation allowing elected officials to serve 12 consecutive years, instead of 8.
When the mayor first spoke with Ms. Quinn about his designs on a third term, during a phone call in the fall of 2008, it was to tell her of his decision to rewrite the law, not to seek her approval beforehand, she said in an interview last week.
Ms. Quinn did not object. Asked about her reply to the mayor, she said, “I didn’t have much of one.”
In the interview, Ms. Quinn acknowledged how pivotal Mr. Bloomberg was in her deliberations, saying she would not have reversed course on the divisive issue if Mr. Bloomberg had not proposed changing the law.
But Ms. Quinn said her decision was consistent with her longstanding personal opposition to term limits and her belief that in the midst of the 2008 economic crisis, voters should have the chance to keep their elected leaders in place.
“We were in the worst economic recession since the Great Depression and nobody had any sense of how quickly or how long we would stay in the throes of that,” Ms. Quinn said.
A detailed picture of how Ms. Quinn grappled with term limits emerged from dozens of interviews with her, lawmakers, political strategists and city officials who were involved with the decision or have spoken about it with those who were. Many of them discussed the episode on the condition of anonymity to describe conversations that were intended to be confidential.
Lingering Fury
Term limits remains a stubborn issue for Ms. Quinn: as she trails Public Advocate Bill de Blasio in a Democratic mayoral primary that she once dominated, her handling of it five years ago is her biggest political liability.
When she formally rolled out her candidacy in March with a day of neighborhood tours, a man walked up to Ms. Quinn in Queens and loudly asked “Why did you push Bloomberg for a third term?”
The New York Times/Siena College Poll conducted in late August found that two-thirds of likely Democratic voters viewed the overturning of term limits as a bad idea — and of those, 54 percent said they had an unfavorable opinion of Ms. Quinn.
Anticipating the fury, Ms. Quinn’s political team has armed hundreds of volunteers with a carefully worded script to explain her change of heart (“one which the NY Times, Daily News, Mario Cuomo and others also agreed with,” it reads) and quietly conducted a poll to test the lingering potency of the subject.
“Some people express that it’s a decision I made that they really disagree with,” Ms. Quinn said in an interview. “Some people express that it’s a decision I made that they really disagree with and then they cannot vote for me.” Some voters, she added, with a hint of relief, “don’t raise it all.”
The continuing blowback is a bitter turn for Ms. Quinn, who thought she had long ago put the issue behind her. In 2005, she and Mr. de Blasio both ran for speaker promising Council members that they would end the two-term limit, which threatened to eject dozens of the members from office. Once elected speaker, though, Ms. Quinn ran into fierce opposition from Mr. Bloomberg, who called the prospect of nullifying the will of city voters “disgraceful” and promised a veto. After determining that the Council would be unable to override his veto, she abandoned the idea, issuing her 2007 statement.
Then the mayor, reeling from a fizzled White House flirtation and itching to stay in government, changed his mind.
The timing, with the citywide elections barely one year away, was abysmal for Ms. Quinn — who as the powerful Council speaker, with viselike control over all legislation, loomed as the only person standing between the mayor and a third term.
The city’s unforgiving tabloids were feasting on revelations that the Council had stashed money in appropriations for fictitious groups. It was a practice that predated Ms. Quinn, and she soon ended it, but federal investigators were swarming and Ms. Quinn’s attempts at damage control were badly backfiring, alienating Council members who whispered about overthrowing her as speaker.
In May 2008, polling showed that negative perceptions of Ms. Quinn, at the time an all-but-declared candidate to succeed Mr. Bloomberg as mayor, had doubled.
The scandal was “probably at the essence of her decision,” saidMelissa Mark-Viverito, a Council member from Upper Manhattan, echoing the sentiment of several other Council members. (Ms. Mark-Viverito was interviewed before she endorsed Mr. de Blasio for mayor.)
Ms. Quinn confided to a few friends that she saw an upside to putting off her mayoral run and spending another four years at the helm of the Council, a prominent post that played to her strengths as a can-do tactician.
“It’s not the worst thing in the world,” she told one of these people, a longtime adviser, who summed up Ms. Quinn’s state of mind: “Her run for mayor had dissipated. Her desire had dissipated. She was falling back in the polls.”
Aides to Mr. Bloomberg had reached the same conclusion. The “slush fund” scandal, they said in interviews, eliminated any doubt about Ms. Quinn’s willingness to comply with the mayor’s wishes for a third term. To their mind, another term would be a political gift to the speaker as well as the mayor.
Ms. Quinn, always reluctant to publicly cross the mayor, has told those close to her that she worried what might happen if she defied him on such a potent issue. The mayor’s people, a Democratic official recalled Ms. Quinn later explaining, “were prepared to ruin her political career.”
As she weighed how to proceed, a crucial intermediary joined those aides urging her to back the mayor’s plan: Josh Isay, a longtime political adviser to both Ms. Quinn and Mr. Bloomberg, whose firm would go on to make millions of dollars for work on the mayor’s free-spending 2009 campaign. Today, Mr. Isay is the chief strategist for Ms. Quinn’s own mayoral bid.
Ms. Quinn, in the interview, said the slush fund scandal “was not a critical issue for me” in her decision, and she denied having expressed fear of what Mr. Bloomberg might do to her. “I was not concerned about the repercussions with the mayor,” she said. Pressed on how he would have reacted had she rebuffed him on term limits, Ms. Quinn said, “I assume the mayor would be disappointed.”
For weeks, into the fall of 2008, Ms. Quinn publicly refused to say what she would do, until she announced her support on Oct. 12, 2008, for letting herself and her colleagues seek another term. At a news conference, she told reporters: “If voters are not happy with any of us, they have the right to vote us out of office next November.”
‘Carrot-and-Stick’
With Ms. Quinn’s mind made up, she and Mr. Bloomberg unleashed their fierce and coordinated lobbying campaign to cajole wavering Council members to back the term limits measure. A few weeks before the Council voted on the issue, Ms. Quinn sought to persuade Councilman Vincent J. Gentile of Brooklyn, a Democrat, over coffee at a Manhattan diner. During the conversation, the speaker reminded him that she would soon select chairmen for legislative committees, coveted assignments in the Council, according to people with knowledge of the meeting.
“Decisions have to be made,” she told Mr. Gentile, one of the people said.
After Mr. Gentile voted against overturning term limits, Ms. Quinn denied him prestigious chairmanships, leaving him with a lesser post overseeing libraries. “It was carrot-and-stick at epic proportions,” said Councilman James S. Oddo, Republican of Staten Island, who opposed the change in term limits.
Ms. Quinn confirmed that she had lobbied Mr. Gentile at the diner, but said she could not recall mentioning committee chairmanships.
As they lobbied Mathieu Eugene, a Brooklyn Democrat who is the first Council member born in Haiti, Ms. Quinn’s staff discussed the possibility that Mr. Bloomberg would accompany him on a trip to Haiti to deliver aid to the impoverished country, according to two people that Mr. Eugene told of the conversations. Mr. Eugene voted no; neither he nor the mayor went to Haiti. In an interview, Mr. Eugene, who, like Mr. Gentile, is backing Mr. de Blasio for mayor, declined to comment on the conversations.
Ms. Quinn said, “I believe my office made it clear if there was a trip to Haiti, Dr. Eugene should go on it.” But she also said, “I don’t think there was any connection, nor would it have been appropriate if there was any connection, with that to term limits.”
Aides to Ms. Quinn denied having used committee assignments to reward or punish, pointing to many cases where the speaker gave prominent chairmanships to opponents of the change.
The process was unvarnished and ugly at times, council members said, but it worked, showcasing Ms. Quinn’s mastery of the legislative machinery. Despite daunting public polls and deep divisions within the Council, the term limits change passed, 29 to 22, on Oct. 23, 2008.
From the moment she walked off the Council floor that day, Ms. Quinn said, she recognized that the outcome would take a toll. “I knew this was an issue that voters cared about and would continue to care about,” she said.
And she can barely contain her frustration at what she sees as the hypocrisy of Mr. de Blasio, who campaigned for speaker on a pledge to end the two-term limit, but then reversed himself, voting against the change.
She expressed no regrets over her role, however. “I stand by the decisions I make,” she said.
“If you are going to be mayor of the city of New York, you are going to make decisions that are unpopular sometimes,” Ms. Quinn said. “That’s a reality.”
Christine Quinn passes out lulus to Council members who don't have the guts to reject corruption
Friday, January 21, 2011, 4:00 AM
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Mayor Michael Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Christine Quin are greeted by City Council members. |
