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The Mighty Quinn?
By MICHAEL SCHENKLER
It has started.
The schedule of the Speaker of the City Council is being disseminated as if she was a citywide elected official. The “planning purposes” releases to the press carry all the formality that befits a celebrity – political or otherwise. The press operation of the Council Speaker has begun to churn as if it’s on a mission much greater than informing the public on the business of the Council.
The Council Speaker, for those readers not really on top of the nitty gritty of city government, is selected by the members (with the strong guidance of political bosses) out of the members of the City Council. That means the Council Speaker was elected to represent only one Council district or 2 percent of the population. But yet, all of a sudden we get the feeling that the position is being equated to that of the Mayor who is elected to represent 100 percent of the population.
As a matter of fact, we wonder just what percent of the city population knows who the Council Speaker is. Do you?
In January of 2006 Christine Quinn of Manhattan was selected to serve as Speaker of the Council.
She follows Gifford Miller of Manhattan who served from 2002 to 2006, who was preceded by the new Council’s first Speaker, Peter Vallone of Astoria, who served as Speaker for 16 years from 1986 to 2002.
The Speaker’s position apparently comes with more than the power to oversee the Council, assign committees and chairmanships, and dole out perks and member items. It seems to come with the intoxicating belief that the next logical step is Mayor.
The logic fails me.
Quinn has started her campaign and the Council press operation paid for by city tax dollars is not geared to furthering the business of the City but the image of Christine Quinn. She follows behind the two Speakers who preceded her in the misbelief that the position is a launching pad for Mayor or that the people will tolerate her using the money of the city or the power of her office as part of a political campaign.
In 2001, Peter Vallone the first Speaker of the Council, a skilled and polished politician, was attacked first by this writer for using Council staff on campaign stops. It became an issue in the race and at the end of the day, in the Democratic Primary, Vallone, who had significant name recognition from 16 years in the Speaker position, finished the Democratic Primary third out of four real candidates with 155,192 votes, a dismal 19.87 percent of the total cast.
In 2005, Giff Miller, the bright and energetic second Speaker of less than four years, swallowed the pill and not only used his office but millions of Council dollars mailing to further his Mayoral campaign. His efforts were already faltering but Miller finished the Democratic Primary in 2005 fourth out of four real candidates with only 48,515 votes, just 10.34 percent of the total.
Is there a lesson in the above numbers?
You bet there is – quite a few.
‧ The chances of a member of the City Council who previously stood for election in only one district (2 percent of the population) is not good – even if you are Speaker. Mayors are made from other stuff. We’ll elaborate at some other time.
‧ Using the power and perks of the office of the Speaker to further one’s personal political campaign doesn’t work. It came back to haunt the two out of two Speakers who tried it.
‧ The chemistry of a Mayoral election calls for greater magic, more charisma, more experience, and more raw power than one can possible acquire in a few years in the Council and a few years as Speaker.
‧ Likewise, the position of Mayor calls for greater magic, more charisma, more experience, and more raw power than one can possible acquire in a few years in the Council and a few years as Speaker.
‧ It is very unlikely that Christine Quinn will be the next Mayor of New York City and her attempt to use her office and the budget she controls to further her campaign effort will come back to haunt her.
Nothing is definite in politics and I’ve only casually met Quinn. Therefore, I still have an open mind on the subject of her Mayoral aspirations. I look forward to sitting down and hearing the thoughts of the talented Speaker.
I only hope that I do not find myself talking about her using city staff and money in promoting her candidacy.
But somehow, I think it may be inevitable.
We’ll see.
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Spitzer’s First 60 Days
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| Henry Stern
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By
HENRY STERN
Last week, Gov. Eliot Spitzer presented his first full-dress report on his stewardship of New York State. Speaking at the New York Hilton to 650 civic and business leaders brought together by the Association for a Better New York, the governor presented the audience with an array of achievements which he asserted his administration had already accomplished.
Among them was workers’ compensation reform, under which he said benefits to injured employees had been increased and payments by companies reduced.
Another issue that had led to a multi year dispute between Gov. Pataki and Speaker Sheldon Silver’s State Assembly, the civil confinement of mentally ill sex offenders after their prison term expires, was also resolved this month.
The governor made a professional Power Point presentation which was a tour de force. He spoke extemporaneously and eloquently, although perhaps too quickly for slower ears and minds. He displayed a commanding personality and, when he is temperate, he comes across very well. Whether or not they agreed with everything he said, the audience was universally impressed with his grasp of the issues and his command of the language.
Even if the governor is not, as U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel asserted, “the world’s smartest man,” he may well be America’s smartest governor. You would never dream of another state-wide official making an equivalent presentation.
The core of the governor’s speech was that New York State had the highest taxes in the country and, for all the money we spent, a relatively low success ratio in education and health. He accused the city’s hospitals of using Medicaid to subsidize graduate medical education, and charging the state for excess bed capacity. He said Medicaid funding should correspond with the percentage of Medicaid patients at the hospital. Egad.
He singled out Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union and the Greater New York Hospital Association as supporters of the status quo and enemies of progress. He flashed their logos on the screen repeatedly, so they could not say they were ignored. He showed a chart which said they had spent $65 million on an education fund, (one might say propaganda) and were the largest lobbyists in the state. This will most likely be his prime reform issue in 2007.
Spitzer went on to denounce Gov. Pataki’s 2002 deal with the hospitals and unions under which a $3 billion one-shot revenue item from the conversion of Blue Cross and Blue Shield to for-profit corporations was used to fund wage increases which would be permanent, not one-shot. Spitzer did not say that, after this agreement, the union endorsed Gov. Pataki for re-election over Carl McCall, but many in the room were nonetheless aware of the fact.
The governor was on shakier ground discussing education. He wants to spend even more money than the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit requires. He showed impressive charts indicating how a substantially lower percentage of New York students graduate from high school, compared with the rest of the country.
In exchange for additional billions of dollars, the Governor demands “accountability” in education. How do you measure that? Test scores. He doesn’t really want a culture of testing but he knows it is necessary. But what do you do if the test scores remain low? Fire the teacher or principal? Require the pupil to repeat the grade? Increase or reduce the budget? Who really knows?
One can demand accountability in the manufacture of engines, or in the care of injured soldiers. It is much harder to require specific results in educating young children from deprived backgrounds and incomplete families. The governor promises all day kindergartens and more pre-schools. That should be helpful. But what about the substantial drop in scores between the fourth and eighth grades?
The governor wants kids to learn to read, write and do math. But at this time, school systems decline to use techniques which may have a better chance of reaching these goals, because these methods are not politically correct. There was not a word in the speech about pedagogy, phonics, fuzzy math, or the teachers union. There was a lot about money. But money can’t cure everything. Ask any dead billionaire.
It was, however, only Day 60, and one cannot expect even a prodigy to resolve perennial problems in so short a stretch. We hope the governor will apply himself to education with the intensity with which he has mastered other subjects. To help the mayor retain control of the schools in 2009, essential to keeping the foxes out of the henhouse and destroying whatever progress has been made, the governor will have to involve himself substantively, not merely bankroll what one could call Educaid.
The governor knows Medicaid, with which he had peripheral involvement as attorney general. He was frustrated because he was denied by the state health department and the federal Department of Health and Human Services the tools and data he needed to fight fraud directly. He has used that knowledge to prepare an effective program, which he is now in a position to try to effectuate.
Our conclusion is that the governor is a highly competent and forceful executive, with the potential for excellence. He is off to a fast start, and, as we know, gets quite upset if he loses on something. This may be a vice or a virtue. Hopefully, his leadership will emancipate legislators from the bonds of their lobbyists and enable New York State to escape from its miserable fiscal and economic condition, due in part to its partisanship and politics, which have resulted in a generation of mediocrity, indolence and submission.
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Not4Publication.com by Dom Nunziato |
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