The lady doesn’t look ready for prime time.
City Council Speaker Christine Quinn (right) wanted to score a politi cal touchdown. Instead, the “Hate Walmart” pep rally she threw last week fumbled, as one star anti-Wally witness, then another, came off as a Wal-lover.
Professor David Merriman of the University of Illinois testified that Walmart actually brought a slight increase in jobs to Chicago. And he praised the retailer for offering cut-rate tube socks to struggling consumers. Quinn was not happy.
So the brassy New Yorker went a familiar route. She nagged. Quinn hectored that Walmart’s wages are low, and its jobs grunt work. Merriman nearly lost his cool.
“This is an anti-Walmart panel,” he shot back. “I will not take a position.”
What happened?
“It was a mistake,” conceded a source close to Quinn. Merriman “shouldn’t have been on a quote-unquote ‘anti-Walmart’ panel.”
Quinn blamed bad weather for forcing two Wal-neutral profs to testify via the Internet. “I wish we didn’t have to have two of them on video conference, with no opinion,” she told me. And what of her furious opposition to Walmart?
“I’ve never been in one,” said Quinn. “It’s not that I’ve been pissed off by a cashier. They’re small-business killers.”
From City Hall to Staten Island, the hearing sparked questions. What is Christine Quinn up to?
The answer is as obvious as her newly slimmed-down waistline. Quinn wants to be the first woman, the first openly gay person, to be elected mayor the way I want to win Mega Millions. She’s got one problem: her political soulmate, Mayor Bloomberg.
The hearing was a chance for Quinn to distance herself from the mayor, who favors Walmart. But even with the mayoral election off in 2013, political types believe Quinn is tardy to the party.
“It’s too late for Quinn,” pronounced an insider. “She’s identified herself with him for so long.”
“Oh, please — she’s one of the most calculating politicians the city has,” said another. “You think she hasn’t had conversations behind the scenes every time she attacks one of his commissioners at a blizzard hearing?”
“You can’t get elected in this town being with the mayor, against him, being a pingpong ball,” said a third.
Political consultant Hank Sheinkopf thinks Quinn is fierce. “She is an Irish pol who happens to be a lesbian,” he said. “She is a smart pol first.”
But siding with the majority, consultant Joseph Mercurio thinks her 2008 support for extending term limits hurt mortally.
“The gay issue could be a problem in the outer boroughs,” he added. “I suspect in the next two years Walmart will open a store and not create damage. Voters will ask, ‘Why was she keeping out low prices?’ ”
The 2013 race today looks like a six-person Democratic affair, with ex-Comptroller Bill Thompson saying, “Yes, I’m going to run, absolutely, positively.”
Rep. Anthony Weiner sounds bullish.
“I’m a New York City guy. Would you like to milk cows in Dutchess County? Do they have cows in Dutchess County?” he said, referring to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign “listening tour,” which he won’t repeat.
Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer said it was too early, but he has raised $2 million just in case. (Weiner has 4, Quinn 3.) Comptroller John Liu has made no plans. “I get mentioned and it makes my mom really excited.” Liu is the only potential candidate to say, “Christine is a smart cookie and could very well be the first woman mayor of New York.”
Public Advocate Bill de Blasio wouldn’t talk to me.
Quinn denies she’s changed. “The mayor and I have had numerous points of agreement and points of disagreement in five years. I call ’em as I see ’em.” She called back to stress that she has sided with the mayor on left-unfriendly issues, such as opposing mandatory paid sick leave for small businesses, and shot him down on a Manhattan Jets stadium.
The only certainty for Quinn, who has dropped 20 pounds, is that she’ll continue losing weight. It’s healthy and looks fab in pictures. It’s not too late.
THIS IS AN INJUSTICE FOR LOHAN
Lindsay Lohan has done 13 days in jail for drunken driving. Now the accused sticky-fingered star faces time for allegedly snatching a gold necklace.
Charlie Sheen has done not a minute behind bars for violent acts against women, including threatening his wife with a knife, (accidentally) shooting fiancée Kelly Preston and beating the tar out of a porn-star girlfriend. He trashed a Plaza hotel suite stocked with a naked “escort,” and ingested mounds of cocaine here and in his hooker-choked LA mansion. Last I checked, these activities are illegal.
Train-wreck Lindsay whines that she’s the victim of an ambitious prosecutor. Until there is sexual parity in the treatment of rich, spoiled Hollywood miscreants, I’m forced to side with Linz.
Teen Jet-setter
A 17-year-old child says she hooked up with role model Jet quarterback Mark Sanchez, insisting she’d reached the age of consent before going home with “MARK F- -KING SANCHEZ!” Hide your daughters. It’s the off-season.
‘Spangled’ & tangled
I was disappointed, but not surprised, that Christina Aguilera made an international spectacle of her ambivalence toward our country by mucking up the lyrics of the national anthem at Sunday’s Super Bowl. Schools have been doing the same thing for years.
The Pledge of Allegiance is all but dead in our halls of education. The Christian Science Monitor declared (tongue in cheek, let’s hope) that the anthem is “among the most difficult things any performer ever has to sing. ‘O’er the ramparts we watched’? Why are they singing about people looking at Dodge pickup accessories?”
One can’t expect a warbler of 30 to do justice to a tricky song heard by more than a billion pairs of ears worldwide, much less understand its meaning. This is America.
Mayor’s snow job
Like a groundhog, Mayor Bloomberg popped out of his Upper East Side town house the other day. Deciding that spring was nigh, he brought back alternate-side-of-the-street parking citywide.
But on my Brooklyn block, as well as much of the outer boroughs, huge piles of ice-encased snow still linger from the day after Christmas, eating up legitimate parking spots while the city remains criminally slow to plow us out. Meanwhile, traffic agents ticket iced-in cars with frenetic abandon.
Spring has to come. Eventually.
Times has a cow
A correction from Sunday’s New York Times:
“An article on Jan. 16 about drilling for oil off the coast of Angola erroneously reported a story about cows falling from planes, as an example of risks in any engineering endeavor. No cows, smuggled or otherwise, ever fell from a plane into a Japanese fishing rig. The story is an urban legend.”
No farm animals were mutilated in the reporting of this (fake) story. A relief!