City Council Speaker Christine Quinn officially entered the race this morning to become New York City’s first female and openly gay mayor.
Quinn announced her candidacy in an emotional 5-minute video focusing on her middle-class, Long Island roots, her mother’s death from breast cancer when Quinn was 16 and her 7-year career as Council speaker.
She emphasized the importance of her father’s role in his union, a clear attempt to woo the city’s powerful labor entities whose endorsements are critical in the race.
She also talked about her middle-class roots as she tries to remind New Yorkers she is different from billionaire Mayor Bloomberg with whom she has closely aligned herself over their terms in office.
“My mother’s life and death left me with the belief that our obligation is to use every moment we have on this earth to make it a better place, to make other peoples’ lives better,” she says in the video.
Quinn goes on to tout her accomplishments as speaker, including passing several pro-immigrant bills protecting low-level criminals from deportation and a contentious living-wage bill that she ultimately weakened to appease the city’s business community.
She has a wide lead in the polls over her rivals Bill de Blasio, John Liu and Bill Thompson and has raised the most money.
Quinn later began what she called a walk-and-talk tour, intended to take her to every neighborhood in the city before the Democratic primary in September.
Her first stop was the upper Manhattan neighborhood of Inwood, where she was surrounded by supporters carrying signs that read “Christine Quinn for Mayor” and wearing baseball caps with her initials on them.
Before the walk, Quinn told reporters, “I’m running today and I’ll stack my record against anybody else’s in this field. … I balance budgets on time, and I had the wisdom in the first three years I was speaker, when there were surpluses, to not spend that money.”
Her attempts to meet the people led to a classic New York City moment.
She shook hands with everyone — people on the street, workers in a diner and even a bedraggled-looking man sitting on a sidewalk bench.
“Hi, I’m Christine Quinn and I’m running for mayor,” she told the man, who looked up at her, seemingly puzzled.
“I need some change,” he replied as she searched her pockets, saying, “I don’t have any.”
With AP