Today's NY Times has an article on the first year of Chris Quinn's tenure as Speaker of the New York City Council. Overall, it's pretty favorable coverage for what has to be one of the toughest political jobs around:
When Christine C. Quinn became speaker of the New York City Council last January, she inherited a rabble-rousing body that relished its role as heckler of the establishment.Quinn is probably the highest ranking gay elected official in the country. And as the Times notes, there is already a lot of speculation about whether she'll run for Mayor of NYC in 2009. We have mutual friends so I've met Chris several times and I am big fan. In addition to being a very good politician, she's actually pretty cool and very normal.
She was the first female speaker and the first to be openly gay, and she had already clashed with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg over his stand on gay marriage and his plans for a football stadium on the West Side.
But over the last year, Ms. Quinn, 40, has broken with Council tradition and reshaped the institution from a theater of opposition to a rigidly disciplined body where, in exchange for private collaboration, open dissent is barely tolerated.
She has also emerged as an influential partner of the mayor, pushing him to include more lower-cost housing in a tax break program for developers, shepherding his waste plan through a not-in-my-backyard Council, and expanding neighborhood input on West Side rezoning.
High-stakes conflict between the city’s two most powerful officials has suddenly been replaced with a nonideological focus on effectiveness and collaboration.
“Here you have a liberal Irish lesbian woman speaker working well with a Jewish Republican billionaire pragmatist mayor,” said Douglas A. Muzzio, a professor of public affairs at Baruch College. “The political environment has changed.”
Seems like Chris is doing a great job as Speaker and I have no doubt she'll be a super Mayor when the time comes.
