The NY Times Documentary On Christine Quinn

If you enjoyed watching the Christine Quinn campaign go down in flames the first time around, you can relive it in this Times documentary.

It's clear from this documentary that many people do not like her, that she knew it and she had to face that day after day on the trail.

There's a sense that they could have given Quinn's wife, Kim Catullo, a more prominent role in the campaign and tried to humanize Quinn a bit more, make her more sympathetic.

I've seen some people on the Internet say they should have done that very early on, knowing that the term limits betrayal and her own temperament/personality issues were going to be problems.

I dunno, I just don't think Quinn could get past those two issue no matter what.

She screwed over too many people over the years, made too many enemies, made too many backroom deals.

You can see how vociferous the Anybody But Quinn people are in the Times documentary.

I followed them throughout the campaign, saw them on the street, watched Quinn's poll numbers plummet as they started running their ad against her.

They did some serious damage.

By the end of the spring, I think the only way Quinn could have won this race was if she had managed to make it to a runoff against Anthony Weiner.

Quinn's flaws and problems pale compared to his.

She would have beaten him.

But anybody else - I don't think so.

Her flaws and problems were, in the end, fatal to her Gracie Mansion ambitions.

Quinn says in the documentary that she never anticipated the negativity she would get in the campaign from Day One.

Well, she should have.

When you have your own dedicated cadre of protesters who follow you around the city, when you have to embargo your public schedule because of those protesters, when people on a daily basis come up on the street to you and tell you they can't vote for you because of the term limits betrayal - these were all signs how tough things were going to be.

And one more thing:

I don't buy that she didn't win because she's a woman or because she is a lesbian.

She didn't win because she is unlikable, she is a nasty person with a track record of that nastiness, she is an untrustworthy person who betrayed the will of the voters with her term limits shenanigans.

In the end, she lost because she was nothing more than an old-style backroom Irish boss and, exposed as just that by her term limits maneuvers, people decided they didn't want her as mayor.

Yes, de Blasio surged because of the Dante ad and his positioning himself on the left over stop-and-frisk.

But it just as easily could have been Thompson who beat her too, had de Blasio not surged at the end.

Given all her negatives and her inability to make people forget about the term limits manipulation, she had little chance to win.