Comments (0) Best Political Revival - 2011
City Council Speaker Christine Quinn
Timing is everything. For all the heat Mike Bloomberg took for his third-term push, his partner in that maneuver and most things since, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, has emerged untouched as the early front-runner in polls for the mayor when Bloomberg is term-limited out for the second time. Quinn not only earned a valuable chit with the mayor, but she also bought herself time to recover from the council's member-item slush-fund scandal that nearly ended her political career. Out of office and scandal-brushed, she would have had a difficult time mounting a second act. (Her predecessor as speaker, Gifford Miller, under whom the practice started, has stayed on the sidelines since leaving the council.) With the wind at the back of the most powerful openly gay official the city has yet seen after Albany's historic passage of the gay-marriage bill, she's poised for a bid to become the city's first Democratic mayor in 20 years.
