NY Times: Bloomberg Didn't Ask Quinn To Overturn Term Limits, He Told Her To Do It

Front page story in the NY Times tonight that makes Christine Quinn seem powerless and inconsequential in relation to Mayor 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 blessing 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.”

The rest of the article details how Quinn twisted arms and cajoled votes by threatening members or bribing them with committee assignments.

That LBJ stuff is quintessential Quinn, getting what she wants by being the old school Irish political boss she is.

But even with all that, the feeling I was left with after reading the article is, she had no choice to do anything other than what the mayor wanted her to do.

She was of no consequence to his decision to overturn term limits, even as he had kept her from overturning them a few years before when he had threatened a veto.

She's running as some powerful political figure, the can-do candidate who can get things done.

But this Times article makes her seem diminished and a doormat for Bloomberg.

Not exactly a great selling point in the Democratic primary.

Maybe The Elites Should Get Out Of The House More

Harry Enten links to the Politicker article covering the Anybody But Quinn rally yesterday and says:

It's just hard to understate how much a certain % of the population dislikes Quinn http://t.co/UEgdrbKbGO
— Harry Enten (@ForecasterEnten) August 29, 2013

Farrell McManus responded with this:

@ForecasterEnten Media just now seeing this. They tend to be more on elite side and they think everyone loves MB.Didn't realize extent..
— Farrell McManus (@McManusNYLJ) August 29, 2013

@ForecasterEnten of dissatisfaction with Bloomberg, S&F etc. term limits angered ppl but when staring at that $120 mil war chest shrugged...
— Farrell McManus (@McManusNYLJ) August 29, 2013

@ForecasterEnten and did not vote. 2009 was not about love of Bloomberg it was ppl saying cant beat $120 mil. But no one forgot.
— Farrell McManus (@McManusNYLJ) August 29, 2013

That's exactly right.

Bloomberg and his corporatist backers thought they could overturn the will of the people by putting the fix in for Bloomberg's third term.

They bought Quinn off and she got Mike Bloomberg his third term.

But people haven't forgotten or forgiven her for helping Bloomberg to his third (illegal) term.

Even in '09, with $120 million to drop on the campaign and an opponent who was either too inept or too corrupt to mount a decent challenge to Bloomberg,  the Mayor of Money still only won by five percentage points.

That's how little loved Mike Bloomberg was.

Come 2013, two thirds of city voters are saying the city must go in a different direction from Bloomberg's policies.

Quinn, the person who engineered four more years of Bloomberg's policies, is going to have hard time winning those people over.

In fact, she'll never win them over.

This morning I posted that the Quinn campaign, in its arrogance, didn't think having a dedicated cadre of protesters who follow Quinn around the city was such a big deal.

But in point of fact, that kind of thing is symbolic of how many people in this city feel about Christine Quinn.

Remember, among the mayoral candidates, only Weiner has higher negative numbers than Quinn.

Remember, Quinn is the only mayoral candidate who has to embargo her daily schedule to try and keep her dedicated cadre of protesters from finding her.

These are not the kinds of problems that successful mayoral candidates deal with in the course of campaign.

They are the kinds of problems that indicate fatal flaws in a candidate and a campaign.

Perhaps if the elite media got off the cocktail circuit a little more and talked to some ordinary folks, they'd now this kind of thing.

But the truth is, the elite media in this city despise ordinary people almost as much as Mike Bloomberg does.

They see us as sheep to be led, lemmings to be manipulated.

This time around, they were wrong.

That's why Christine Quinn is about to follow Gifford Miller into private life.

Bloomberg Sends Howard Wolfson On NY1 To Attack Bill De Blasio

First former UFTer Randi Weingarten attacked de Blasio today, now Howie Wolfson, one of the slimiest people on the face of the planet (and also a former UFT consultant) attacked de Blasio as well:

Just in case it wasn’t already clear from the barbs on his Twitter feed, Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson is not a fan of Bill de Blasio’s vision for the city.

During an appearance tonight on NY1, the man who has become the mayor’s chief mouthpiece, continued to dig into the sudden front-runner in the mayor’s race, doubling down on previous criticism and accusing the city’s public advocate of flip-flopping on term limits. The attack comes as various forces are ramping up their efforts to halt Mr. de Blasio’s unexpected gains in the polls with just two weeks to go until the primary.

Mr. Wolfson began by defending a recent tweet that summed up Mr. de Blasio’s agenda as “higher taxes, bigger govt, more biz mandates. A u-turn back to the 70s.” He said that, while Mr. de Blasio might disagree with the “phraseology,” there’s no doubt that Mr. de Blasio wants to reverse course on the Bloomberg years.

“You know, I think we’ve had the best 12 years of the city’s history in the last 12 years and Bill de Blasio wants to undo that,” argued Mr. Wolfson, who has known Mr. de Blasio for years. “He wants to take the city back to a different style of governing, where we had higher taxes, where we had more regulation on business, where we had more permissive policing.”

“I think it would be a mistake,” he concluded. “We tried that in New York … It looked like 1974. And it wasn’t a pretty picture in the 70s and 80s here and I don’t think New Yorkers want to go back to that. I don’t think we want to undo 12 of the best year’s in the city’s history.”

Later, Mr. Wolfson attacked Mr. de Blasio for changing his mind on term limits, saying that he’d been personally confused by Mr. de Blasio’s change of heart since 2005.

“Consistency on the campaign trail is important. I have been confused as a voters, as a citizen, about his position on term limits,” said Mr. Wolfson, echoing a recent talking point used by Mr. de Blasio’s rival, Council Speaker Christine Quinn’s campaign. When Mr. de Blasio ran for speaker in 2005, said Mr. Wolfson, he “was very clear that he wanted to overturn term limits and that he wanted to do it legislatively.”

“So I’m confused as to how somebody who had that position in 2005 now running for mayor has a different position and says what we need to do is criticize others for changing term limits,” he added. “That does not make sense to me and I find it confusing in the context of the campaign that he’s using this as a primary means of attack, mostly against my boss.”

Mr. Wolfson was also asked about today’s New York Times front-page story examining  Mr. de Blasio’s leadership as manager of Hillary Clinton’s U.S. Senate campaign–on which Mr. Wolfson served as chief spokesman. According to the paper, Mr. de Blasio was “frequently indecisive” and sometimes “agonizingly inefficient in a high-pressure, ever-shifting situation. Mr. de Blasio rejected those claims when asked by Politicker today.

But Mr. Wolfson, all too inclined to rip into Mr. de Blasio on his policy agenda, side-stepped the question.

“You now, I’m not gong to criticize his tenure on the campaign. I enjoyed working with him on that campaign. He and I are friends,” he repeated several times, before concluding that Mr. de Blasio is “a good guy,”

“You know, I don’t think he’s  the right person to be mayor,” he added, “but he’s a good person.”

Howie Wolfson, as hired political gun, will stick the shiv in, but only so far.

What a guy.

You can see the desperation the establishment is feeling over de Blasio's rise in the polls.

It's weird, really, since I'm sure de Blasio can be bought off if he were to get elected mayor.

Yet they're really going at him with guns ablazin' .

Makes you wonder if the internal polls are showing an increased de Blasio lead and they're trying to cut him off at the pass before next week.

Or maybe they're just taking no chances and going extra heavy anyway.

Regardless of the reason, given the firepower they're sending out after him from the press, from the unions, now from the Bloomberg administration, it seems pretty clear they feel threatened by him.

Weiner: Overturning Term Limits Worse Than Sexting Penis Photos

From Daily Politics:

His nude selfies were splashed online, he lied about his Twitter account being hacked, and "dishonored" his wife, but Anthony Weiner can hold his head high ... because at least he didn't overturn term limits.

In a video released to supporters by his campaign on Friday, Weiner is shown telling a fired up voter - who wants to know what it'll take to make him quit - that there are worse things he could've done.

"You ... have a long record to look at. I did not, for example, come to the people in this room and say I am going to embezzle money or I am gonna turn over your right to have a vote for a third term," he told the man.

"That's something that was passed by the city of New York."

In the video, Weiner gets applause when he says he didn't  "turn over your right to have a vote for a third term."

I'm not sure that's a sign that people are ready to vote for Weiner as it is a sign that Quinn still has trouble over the term limit issue and will have her work cut out for her in a runoff.

The polling on the term limits overturn, the dedicated cadre of Quinn protesters who follow her around, the Quinn campaign's continued embargoing of Quinn's daily schedule so that protesters have a harder job finding her - these are all signs that Quinn, despite her renewed "frontrunner status" in the polls released after Weiner's sexting scandal redux, has a tough road ahead of her.

Quinn Says Compared To Weiner, She's "Straightforward About The Truth"

On Thursday, Anthony Weiner defended the deceptions and half-truths he has offered around his sexting issues by taking a shot at Christine Quinn:

“I didn’t lie to the people of the City of New York and say I wasn’t gonna overturn term limits."

Yesterday Quinn returned the favor, comparing her honesty to Weiner's dishonesty:

In her attacks on Mr. Weiner, she has portrayed him as a man with little fidelity to the truth who now lacks the credibility and stature required of a big-city mayor. Her advisers are hoping such a message resonates with voters who are outraged not only about Mr. Weiner’s racy online escapades but also the fact that he led them to believe when he entered the race that he had ended such behavior when he resigned from Congress and sought therapy.

“You need a New Yorker who is going to be straightforward about the truth, particularly when it isn’t what people want to hear, particularly in the tough, tough moments,” Ms. Quinn said.

The city does need a mayor who is going to be straightforward about the truth.

That person would not be Christine Quinn.

Let's review how "straightforward about the truth" she was when she helped Bloomberg overturn term limits so he could run for a third term, via Chris Smith of New York Magazine:

For years, Quinn opposed term limits, a position that helped her get elected speaker by fellow Council members in 2005. Once in the job, though, she commissioned a poll, and it showed that the public opposed tinkering with them. In December 2007, Quinn declared that repealing term limits would be “anti-democratic,” a position she called “firm and final.”

Well, for ten months. In the spring of 2008, a slush-fund scandal enveloped the City Council. Quinn was never implicated, and made changes to tighten accountability, but the mess hurt her chances of being elected mayor in 2009. Congressman Anthony Weiner, who’d run a smart 2005 mayoral-primary campaign, loomed as a strong contender. Meanwhile, Bloomberg’s presidential dream collapsed, and his business pals began rallying for four more years. In September came the global financial crisis. At the time, Quinn said she was waiting for the mayor’s decision before making up her own mind about term limits, but one member of the Bloomberg camp says Quinn’s support was never in doubt. “She went through this whole period of, uh, reflection,” the Bloomberg insider says with a laugh, “but it was clearly in her interest to hit the PAUSE button on a race for mayor.”

Quinn says, vehemently, that the economy was the reason she flipped on term limits and that her own career prospects had nothing to do with it. “At that moment in time, I was extremely worried about the impact of the economy on New York City,” she tells me. “And I was really worried about the impact that a wholesale change in government would have on the ability of the city to recover. I thought it was appropriate to give New Yorkers a choice, at the ballot box, to either keep some level of consistent leadership in city government or to change. I have no regrets about the decision I made. The term-limits decision and [my political prospects] couldn’t have less to do with each other. When I made the decision about term limits, it was exclusively based on the economic situation.”

Inflexibility in the face of an emergency, she says, would have been a mistake for the city. “With elected officials, and with human beings, you say what you mean, you say what you believe, and sometimes things change,” Quinn says. “Things evolve. And then you’ve got to stand up and say this is why things have changed. And then you’ve got to accept the consequences of that as a leader.”

When it came to rounding up the necessary 26 council votes, Bloomberg didn’t leave the task completely to Quinn, mounting a muscular political operation. The mayor’s men weren’t exactly pushing against a locked door: Most council members were eager to hold on to their jobs. Yet persuading individual members to take a controversial vote was tricky, and Quinn’s strategizing played an important role. “We worked hand in glove with her and her staff,” a Bloomberg aide says.“Certain members were undecided, and you had to compare notes on what their issues were. Sometimes there are things that are desired that one side can’t offer but the other side can. It was a joint effort.” One council member says he got multiple calls from Quinn lieutenants dangling a committee chairmanship in exchange for a “yes” vote. “The mistake people make with Christine is they think, She’s from Manhattan, she’s gay, and hence she’s a liberal,” he says. “But at heart she’s really an old-school Irish boss.”

Quite frankly, there is nothing "straightforward" or "truthful" about Christine Quinn.

Her term limit flip-flop, her bribing council members with committee chairmanships, her threatening to retaliate against council members who didn't vote to give Bloomberg his third (illegal) term, her secret machinations to make sure Bloomberg got what he wanted - there is nothing "straightforward" or "truthful" about any of this.

The NY Times article on Quinn today reports that her campaign is "delighted" at Weiner's travails and loves comparing his dishonesty with Quinn's "straightforwardness."

But let's remember, before Weiner entered the race and made "sexting" the biggest tabloid issue of the campaign, Quinn's flip-flop on term limits was that issue.

Just because Anthony Weiner has been exposed as a liar and a serial sex freak doesn't take away the fact that a good part of the Democratic electorate views Christine Quinn as a liar and a bullshit artist.

Weiner's fall does help Quinn in that it pretty much ensures she makes the runoff in September.

But once she gets to that runoff, she is going to have to convince the Democratic electorate that her betrayal over term limits, her use of a slush fund to reward council members, and the notoriety she has for punishing enemies by defunding projects in their districts like senior citizens programs and tuition aid for college students isn't a problem.

So far, polls show she has an upward battle to do that in a runoff against either Thompson or de Blasio.

Where The Mayoral Race Now Stands

Let's assume that Christine Quinn is back in front, with yesterday's Marist poll showing her regaining the lead over scandal-scarred Anthony Weiner, but that her frontrunner status is fluid.

Even though the primary is just 45 days away, we're still early in the race and Quinn and Weiner were both leading the pack based on name recognition and notoriety as much as anything else.

Let's also assume that Weiner is going to continue to lose support as the days go on.

Weiner's had a brutal week in the press, the Marist poll already shows a huge drop in his support, and with more sexting revelations almost certain to come, it's difficult to see how Weiner doesn't continue to hemorrhage support and fall into near irrelevancy in the race.

He has no institutional support, no union support, barely has an organization and even without this latest sexting scandal redux would have had a difficult time placing in the runoff.

Post revelations he has no chance at all.

His name will remain on the ballot even if he drops out and he will still garner some support on Primary Day, but for all practical purposes Weiner's in the rear view mirror in this race - unless something changes drastically in the next 6 weeks, Weiner's going to be polling in the single digits come Primary Day.

Comptroller John Liu, himself scarred by scandal, has never polled in double digits and is not a contender for the race.

That leaves Quinn, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio and Bill Thompson, former comptroller, as the serious contenders for the nomination.

Indeed, that's just what the Marist LV model released yesterday showed, with Quinn leading the pack, de Blasio in second and Thompson in fourth, one point behind Weiner.

Azi Paybarah makes the argument that Thompson, ever the stealth candidate, has the most growth potential as measured by the Marist poll:

We haven't heard much about Bill Thompson (or anyone else, for that matter) since the unmasking of Carlos Danger earlier this week.

But as I wrote earlier about the former comptroller, before a recent poll showing him winning handily in hypothetical run-offs against his leading rivals and before Weiner's latest debacle, there's good reason to believe that Thompson's potential support isn't being reflected by the top-line numbers in the polls.

My guess is that Thompson, who is likeable without being the least bit exciting, will continue to plod along for a while longer without receiving more than a modest share of attention or (with the honorable exception, naturally, of Wayne Barrett) scrutiny. For now, as this video from a brief scrum outside a mayoral forum in Jackson Heights last night illustrates, Weiner seems capable of guaranteeing that much single-handedly, as his candidacy continues to play out like some combination of catch-penny reality show and B-horror movie. The Weiner Show is "bad for democracy," maybe, but good for ratings.

Meanwhile, yesterday's NBC 4 New York / Wall Street Journal / Marist poll had Thompson tied with Bill de Blasio among registered voters in the primary, and two points behind de Blasio among "likely voters." Another modest showing.

But the cross-tabs suggest there's a lot of room for Thompson to advance. According to the poll, Thompson has only 23 percent of support among black voters, and five percent among Latino voters. He'll almost certainly outperform percentages like those, significantly.

It wouldn't be the first time.

I found it interesting that de Blasio showed movement in a public poll for the first time when Marist was released yesterday.

Up until now, de Blasio had been mostly polling at 10% or 11% and had shown no ability to cut through the crowd and move up in any of the polls.

One poll does not convince me he really has a shot at making the runoff, but he will benefit from Weiner's loss of support.

But so will Thompson - blacks have been supporting Weiner in large numbers, but as they fall away from supporting Weiner, it's probable they will move to Thompson.

Quinn, for all the noise in yesterday's poll (and an earlier NY Times poll showing her in the lead), has a ceiling of support that, while not as defined as Weiner's, is nonetheless quite solid.

After all, this is still a candidate with a dedicated cadre of protesters who follow her around the city at her appearances.

This is still a candidate who embargoes her campaign appearances so as not to be followed around by her dedicated cadre of protesters.

And this is still a candidate who betrayed voters by enabling Bloomberg's third term fraud, an act of political expediency that still sticks in many a craw among Democrats in the city.

So where does this leave us in late July, with the heavy ad season upon us?

It seems to me that, barring unforseen circumstances (and given the craziness of this campaign season, there is no way we can do that), Quinn and Thompson should be considered the favorites to take the top two slots in the September primary.

Quinn on name recognition alone, Thompson because he most likely will outperform how he is polling now.

If it's Thompson and Quinn in the runoff, then Thompson probably wins handily.

The Quinnipiac poll showed that earlier in the week, with Thompson besting Quinn in a runoff by 11 percentage points.

But all this presupposes unforseen circumstances and that we cannot do - as Azi Paybarah noted, other than Wayne Barrett, no one has given Thompson much scrutiny yet, but if he makes it to the runoff, that scrutiny will come.

If something turns up, well, you never know what can happen then.

It's been a truly crazy race so far, with lots of twists and turns for those of us paying attention since the beginning.

The exciting thing about all of this is, if you're an Anybody But Quinn person, she had her "inevitability bubble" burst long ago when she went from the presumed frontrunner to also-ran behind Weiner.

Now Weiner has gone from frontrunner and serious contender to national joke.

Remember when we were worried that we were going to be stuck with a Weiner/Quinn runoff to take on Lhota?

Well, it looks like we don't have to worry about that anymore.

I've been saying that it wasn't time to panic yet, that we weren't stuck with a Weiner/Quinn runoff because there was still plenty of time for either one of those candidates or both to take heavy damage or implode before the primary.

That has now happened to Weiner.

It may still happen to Quinn.

Hell, it could happen to Thompson or de Blasio too.

But no matter what happens, we now have a real race on our hands and we just may yet get a successor to Bloomberg who will not run a Bloomberg Mach IV administration.

That's not a bad place to be in late July with just over six weeks to go before Primary Day.

Wiener: Sure, I Sent Penis Photos, But At Least I Didn't Overturn Term Limits

Love it - Anthony Weiner, in defending his sexting communications, attacked Christine Quinn yesterday:

Serial sexter Anthony Weiner admitted yesterday he had cybersex with at least three women after he resigned from Congress over his infamous sexting scandal.

That brings his total extramarital Internet dalliances to at least 13, and Weiner suggested that was his final answer.

“I don’t believe I had any more than three,” he said when pressed for a count of his post-resignation assignations by a Post reporter during a campaign stop at a Brooklyn soup kitchen.

The married mayor wannabe claimed he’s still “working with people” to curb his peter-tweeting proclivities, but insisted he’s not a virtual sex addict.

...

Weiner also took time during the firestorm of questions to lash out at mayoral challenger and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who has questioned his judgment.

“I didn’t lie to the people of the City of New York and say I wasn’t gonna overturn term limits,” he blasted.

Excellent strategy, Anthony.

Dish some dirt on Quinn while you're drowning in your own scandal and try and help people remember just what a sleaze Quinn is too.

That's what we want to see.

Quinn, Bloomberg Share Kiss Over Last Budget Deal

Whoever makes the runoff in the Democratic primary with Christine Quinn ought to run this photo every half hour on every broadcast channel plus NY1: