“The council speaker is trying desperately to be all things to all people. She believes she can become the next mayor by splitting all the babies in half.  Stop-and-frisk, wage mandates, economic development, education, union power, taxing and spending — she tries always to thread the needle between competing interests.” It is a “ham-handed effort to simultaneously pander to opposites. . . Thus, she wants the business community to believe she shares its concerns about wage and sick-leave laws, while telling the unions her heart is with them on the same issues. She collected money from both sides, and both now demand their piece of flesh.”

Quinn “will first have to cut her path to City Hall through . . . a Council that may include members eager to exact revenge on the outgoing speaker, while also battling the persistent impression she is a political stand-in, a Medvedev to Mr. Bloomberg’s Putin.”

“Among the political chattering classes, Ms. Quinn is thought to be a long shot, someone too close to the mayor to be palatable to a Democratic primary electorate. Labor and progressives have won both of the past two contested Democratic citywide elections, and installed one of their own, Eric Schneiderman, as the state’s attorney general. And to them Ms. Quinn has become a kind of pariah.”

“There is some disagreement in political circles about how popular Quinn . . .remains in LGBT circles. Her perch as Speaker of the City Council makes her one of the highest-ranking LGBT politicians in the nation, but she grabbed just over 50 percent of the vote in her re-election bid in 2009, despite running in the most heavily LGBT district in the country.”

“After months of maintaining a cool, above-the-fray approach to the 2013 mayoral race, Christine Quinn. . . is enduring the first bumps of what may be a pockmarked road to the Democratic primary.”