I wasn’t figuring this out all by myself. Running for office is always a team effort. Besides Kim, I had a small and strong group of people working with me and helping me strategize. The race for Speaker is different from other races. It’s old school. On the face of it, the Speaker is elected by the fifty other members of the City Council. But in reality, the Democratic county leaders have a huge influence on the process.
In New York City, there are five Democratic Party county leaders, one from each of the city’s boroughs: Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Manhattan, and Staten Island. (Each borough is also a county, which is why each has its own party county leader.) Every member of the City Council and every county Democratic leader has an interest in who becomes the Speaker.
There were two basic ways to go about building the support I needed to win. One was to go from the ground up and persuade enough individual members that I was not only the right person for the job but the candidate with the best chance of winning; no one likes to back a loser, and those who back the winner are more likely to have the ear of the new Speaker. The other way is to go from the top down and persuade the Democratic Party county leaders that you’re the candidate they should support, and then they in turn encourage their City Council delegation to vote for you.
With five other City Council members in the race, we decided to run a hybrid campaign and work it both ways. Working from the top down meant persuading Democratic county leaders that I would work with them on the issues important to them, and that they could trust me to make the difficult decisions. They needed to be convinced that I would be a strong enough leader to run the City Council and work with the mayor.
Working from the bottom up meant winning over key members of the City Council, as well as key candidates for City Council who, once in office, would vote for me and advocate with county leaders. I also worked on building support with prominent labor leaders and other power brokers in the city who could influence both the City Council members and the Democratic county leaders. It was retail politics with an electorate of several dozen people, and it took more than a year. We all worked like dogs.
In the end, a lot came down to the Queens County Democratic leader, Tom Manton, who wielded the most power of all the Democratic county leaders. The Queens delegation of City Council members, which is the second largest after Brooklyn, always votes for Speaker as a bloc. And they vote as a bloc with their county leader. It is a brilliant strategy—it increases their power in selecting the Speaker.
The Queens County Democratic Party holds its events at Antun’s catering hall. Tom Manton used to hang out there at all of the parties and events. I’d be the first one there and the last to leave, which is my philosophy of work. I believe that you should be the most prepared person in the room, and the first to arrive and the last to leave. People would say, “Oh my god, you’re at Antun’s for hours! What hard work!” But for me it actually wasn’t hard work at all.
I loved listening to Tom and the guys he worked with. His stories of being a cop, his stories of being a councilmember and then a congressman—they were just great. They were colorful, and they were New York. I reveled in it. Queens County and its events were fun. Tom liked ice cream. He would have an ice-cream cart at the events, and he liked people to eat ice cream. He would have a centerpiece on every table. For Christmas there’d be poinsettias, and in the fall there’d be pumpkins. And he urged people to take the centerpieces home—it seemed to make him happy when they took the pumpkins and the poinsettias.
He had great characters surrounding him—Jerry Sweeney, Mike Reich, and Frank Bolz, who we refer to as “the guys.” If I said to somebody on my staff, “Call the guys and find out what’s going on,” everybody would know exactly who I meant. And we had a mother-daughter duo, Mary Lu and Jamie Plunkett. A Plunkett has been on staff at county for fifty years. Everyone, including me, would tell the same story at Queens dinners over and over, but every time you hear it is like the first time.
Queens was pivotal to the Speaker’s race, and when I got a call in late 2005 to meet with Tom Manton at his office in Queens, it seemed pretty clear, from everything we were hearing, that I was going to get Tom’s support. Tom was the son of Irish immigrants, a seven-term congressman, and a former member of the City Council. He had been on the council in 1986 when they voted on the gay rights bill. The story goes that he had promised everyone he was going to vote for the bill. Then on the day the council voted, Tom’s priest brought Tom’s father and sat him in the front row, and he voted no.
It would have been easy to tag Tom as antigay from that vote, but his views were more complicated than that, and I suspect it always wore on him that he had not done the right thing. As the Queens County Democratic leader, he was forward-looking. Sometimes political leaders hold on to the ethnic power structure they inherit—whether it’s Irish, or Italian, or Jewish, or whatever—and they fight to keep things from changing. Tom didn’t see Queens that way. He saw his borough as this open gateway for immigrants, and he saw his county as evolving, and he wanted his political organization to reflect that change. No one ever had to demand it; he just did it. He knew it was right. So when South Asians became a significant part of the population, he appointed a South Asian district leader. The same thing happened with Latinos and later with LGBT people. This was a very big thing for someone who had voted against the gay rights bill.
When I was called to Queens to meet with Tom at his law office, they asked me to come alone. Even though I was pretty sure of what was going to happen, I was still nervous because I didn’t know what the conversation was going to be and I’d never been to such a meeting before. What were they going to say they wanted? What kinds of commitments were they going to be looking for? What if what we’d been hearing about Tom’s intention to support me was wrong?
When I walked in, Tom was seated at the head of a rectangular table in a classic, nondescript, windowless conference room. Some of “the guys” were sitting around the table.
It turned out that I had nothing to be nervous about, because Tom had already made up his mind. He wanted me for the job. I’ve since been told I had him at hello. His support and the votes of the Queens delegation were a huge boon to my effort. People will tell you that there are scenarios in which a Speaker wins without Queens, and on paper that’s true, but in reality it’s impossible.
When the meeting ended, I stood up and walked to the end of the table where Tom was sitting. Normally I called Tom “Congressman,” but for some reason on this occasion I said, “Tom, I just want to thank you so much for what you’ve done for me and my family.” I was thanking him for endorsing me and thereby giving me the opportunity to become Speaker. I still had to lock it down, but now it was mine to lose.
In response Tom said, “You’re very welcome, but will you grant me absolution?”
I was a bit taken aback, but thinking back to Tom’s vote against the gay rights bill, I knew exactly what he meant. So I said, “Tom, I don’t need to grant you absolution, but if you grant me absolution, I’ll grant you absolution, and together we’ll go and make this city a much better place.”
That’s why it’s important not to listen to the naysayers. If I had listened to them or to my own naysayer voice, I wouldn’t be Speaker, and almost as important, Tom Manton wouldn’t have gotten to say what he needed to say or had the opportunity to make it right. Tom died the following summer.
A lot of people were surprised by Tom’s endorsement because we often expect others to act based on what they’ve done in the past. And we don’t give people enough credit for their capacity to evolve. Did Tom give me his support because he was attempting to make amends for having voted against the gay rights bill? Or because of our shared Irish heritage? Or because we were similar in a lot of other ways? Was it because he knew how hard I would work? Or all of the above? I’ll never know for sure, but I can tell you that when Tom came to my swearing-in at City Hall in January 2006, just a few months before he died, at the conclusion
of the swearing-in, he jumped to his feet to applaud before anyone else.
Now it was time to get to work. I had had plenty of opportunities to watch Gifford Miller do his job as Speaker. I had a clear understanding of the responsibilities and had filed away important lessons that I’d learned from observing, but the new job involved a different order of demands and decisions from what I was accustomed to. It wasn’t just that I went from having a staff of six to a staff of three hundred. Or that I was now responsible for deciding who on that staff stayed and who had to go and who served on which committees and who got which committee chair assignments. It was all of that, in combination with stepping onto a fast-moving conveyor belt that didn’t stop for anyone. Remember that I Love Lucy episode when she works on the conveyor belt boxing chocolates? That’s how I felt.
The city runs on an annual calendar, and when I took office in January 2006, I had no choice but to jump in, hang on, and get up to speed as fast as I could. For a self-described perfectionist, this was a prescription for very long days and too many sleepless nights. But I wasn’t about to complain.
Well before my swearing-in as the first female and first gay Speaker of the City Council, I knew what kind of Speaker I intended to be. My bottom-line belief in government is that it should be responsive to the needs of all of the people, which meant that as Speaker of the New York City Council, I represented the interests of all New Yorkers in all five boroughs, from small business owners in Brooklyn and the elderly rent-controlled tenant in the Bronx to the owner of the brokerage house on Wall Street, the homeowner in Queens, the car service driver on Staten Island, and the housing authority residents on the Lower East Side.
Sometimes the energy to make changes comes from the people you know, people whose relationships and stories are often indelible. Take, for example, my friend Jackie Adams, who lost two sons to gun violence. One died in Baltimore, and the other in Harlem. She had asked her son to go to the deli to get milk, and he never came home. I love her. This woman has formed a group called Harlem Mothers Save. They meet every Wednesday night in Harlem, and it’s a support group for mothers who’ve lost kids to gun violence. In the face of this loss, she’s the most positive woman you’ll ever meet in your life. She is fighting for her community.
Early in my term as Speaker, Harlem was suffering from a plague of gang-initiated graffiti, which included an image of a rat holding up a sign that said “Stop Snitching.” Jackie called and asked if she could see me. I said, “Sure, sure.” And she came to the office and sat down in a big governmental club chair that swallowed her tiny self up. She told me about the “Stop Snitching” signs, and we decided we had to do something. We went with other mothers and painted over all the graffiti. But what touched me was when she asked, “Can I tell the women on Wednesday that you’re with us?”
I said, “Sure.”
She started to cry.
“Why are you crying?” I asked.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “You’re the Speaker of the City Council.”
This conversation brought home to me the significance of my job to regular New Yorkers.
In a job like mine, getting things done is essential, even if it means compromising on an issue to move things forward. No one elected me to just say no. Deadlock is not a formula for government. In the past, I’d had a ringside seat when things would grind to a halt because the council and the mayor had frequently locked horns and wouldn’t compromise. I made a conscious decision to do it differently, to work with the mayor, because spitting at each other and wagging fingers isn’t governing. I saw Mayor Bloomberg as my colleague. If I was going to be an effective Speaker and we were going to move forward on an agenda that made things better for New Yorkers, I needed him, and he needed me.
That seems like an old-fashioned way of thinking, in these times where standoffs are the rule. And some people have criticized me for working so well with the mayor. But I never doubted that he and I could work together. We already had a track record of working together respectfully even when we didn’t agree. He and I worked with each other on the smoking ban, and we worked against each other when he was pushing a plan to build a football stadium on Manhattan’s West Side—in my district. The project was critically important for the mayor because of his aspirations to bring the Olympics to New York. But I thought it would be terrible for my district and a bad thing for the city overall. I did everything I could to get that project killed. But later he and I worked together on rezoning the proposed stadium site for new office and residential development. He certainly didn’t like that I had helped kill his stadium proposal, but we both knew that we would live to see another day—to agree or disagree, then move on to the next issue.
I believe that my drive to get as much done as possible goes back to my experience of my mother dying young. Because the idea “I’ll get another opportunity” just doesn’t exist in my way of looking at things. That might seem morbid, but it’s quite effective: every moment could be your last, so you have to try to make the most of it. So the idea that I would become Speaker and then squander it for the sake of press or politics or whatever, as opposed to just getting as much done as possible, is unimaginable to me because it’s completely counter to the reality that life is incredibly short.
Working with Mayor Bloomberg and his office was a pleasure after Rudy Giuliani, who had been mayor when I first came to the City Council and whose administration Tom Duane had fought with. Back then Tom and I had been trying to get somebody who lived in a housing project a new toilet, and the manager had said, “You’ll have to call the mayor’s office.” I was like, “Really?” And the manager said, “Yes, everything is going through City Hall.”
So I called City Hall, and they said, “That’s right, we’re taking all constituent issues.”
And I said, “You guys, that’s impossible! I mean, how are you possibly going to take all of this in?” Handling it all through City Hall was not only controlling but ineffective.
Once, when I was on the council during Mayor Giuliani’s term, I was meeting with a commissioner, and the commissioner’s secretary came in and said, “Deputy Mayor so-and-so is on the way.”
“Okay, I’ll wrap up,” I said.
“Wrap up? You’ll get out!” the commissioner said.
“What are you talking about?”
“We’re not allowed to meet with you,” he explained. “I didn’t get this meeting approved by City Hall.”
And so my chief of staff and I had to go out through the loading dock of that building. Literally, we climbed over boxes to get out, and this commissioner was frantic that a deputy mayor might see me.
Criticism of me as Speaker went into high gear in 2008, when Mayor Bloomberg proposed extending term limits so he could run for a third term. I had to decide whether to support his proposal. The choice wasn’t at all clear, and I struggled to balance what was best for him, for the city, for the City Council, and for me personally. (Extending term limits would affect me, too, because it would likely mean putting off plans to run for mayor and serving another four years on the City Council.) We were in a truly tough moment in the city. The bottom had just fallen out of the economy, and we were bracing for the worst recession since the Depression.
Deciding whether to support Mayor Bloomberg on term limits was further complicated by the fact that voters had twice approved limiting the city’s elected officials to two four-year terms. Going against the majority of voters on any issue is never easy. Before the mayor proposed the change, I’d made it clear that the voters had spoken and that I would not support a change in the law. I also had to consider what I’d said in the past about term limits, and whether I wanted to change my position. But now that Mayor Bloomberg had proposed just such a change, I felt compelled in my role as Speaker to consider the many, often contentious voices. And I felt compelled to hold my tongue and keep my thoughts to myself, as people on both sides of the issue made their views known in the press, via e-mail, on the stre
et, and in the corridors of City Hall.
Before I made my decision, I met personally with dozens of councilmembers, who were not at all shy about telling me what they thought, one way or another. I spoke with union leaders and representatives from good-government groups, some of whom supported term limits and some of whom opposed them. My usual goal was to find common ground, but on this issue either you were for or against, because there was no middle ground. My decision to keep my thoughts to myself until the very end and focus on listening to the debate didn’t win me any friends in the press or with people on either side of the divide.
Before the City Council took a final vote, we had two days (and nearly twenty hours) of spirited public hearings to amend the city charter to override the term limits law. I decided to support the mayor and let the voters decide whether to give him a third term. And my constituents, many of whom were furious with me for supporting the mayor, got to decide too. The voters spoke. They reelected the mayor, and they elected me to a third term in the City Council. But neither of us won with huge majorities.
The whole experience with extending term limits was tough, but on reflection I have no regrets about my decision. I think that all too often politicians take a position and never leave themselves open to the possibility that circumstances may change, or that they may learn new information, or that the world may change, and that a position that at one point seemed cast in stone was worth reconsidering. I see no crime in that, and, in fact, I think it’s essential.
With Patience and Fortitude: A Memoir Page 12