Opinion

Out of the closet

Congratulations to Chris Quinn for getting so many of the right noses out of joint over a recent trip she took to Chicago, San Diego and Houston.

The city’s good-government types complain that she collected thousands in campaign donations while on a trip paid for by a political action committee. In this way, they say, the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund helped Quinn skirt campaign-finance restrictions on what she might otherwise have to declare as campaign expenses.

Let’s stipulate that the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund has an interest in the election of a woman who would become New York’s first openly gay mayor. Let’s agree, too, that the trip helped Quinn’s campaign.

But here’s the deal. The best campaign-finance system is one where candidates have to persuade people and organizations to give to their campaigns. If candidates can do this, more power to them. If not, no cash.

Sure seems better than making taxpayers fund campaigns — and then piling on regulations and restrictions, as Gov. Cuomo, Common Cause and almost every other liberal group proposes. Chris Quinn has done us all a service here by dragging New York’s self-defeating election laws out of the campaign-finance closet.