Got this glossy anti-Christine Quinn flyer in the mail over the weekend from New York Is Not for Sale (NYCN4S), which reportedly spent $30,000 to pin the blame for the closure of the area's only hospital -- and the former epicenter of the AIDS epidemic -- on the mayoral hopeful. (It's being converted to luxury residences, one of which is owned by Rosie O'Donnell.)
The mailing warns: "Don't be tricked by Christine Quinn," then quotes Alec Baldwin as saying: "Term limits aren't the only thing Quinn killed. She assisted in bringing down the only hospital trauma facility in the Greenwich Village area when she helped St. Vincent's Hospital to close and sell to developers at Rudin Management, who then contributed to her campaign." Tom Alton adds, "Because of Quinn's decision, you may be spending precious minutes in an ambulance."
I'll admit that I'm not the most knowledgeable person about New York City politics. I do know that I was furious when Mayor Bloomberg pulled a Hugo Chavez and reinstated himself for a third term. And although I'd heard horror stories about relatively healthy people going into St. Vincent's and leaving to go to the morgue, I was also very unhappy when my local hospital was closed in 2010.
But I'm also leery of a group whose motto is "Anybody but Quinn" Anybody? I don't think so. I think most New Yorkers are more pragmatic than that. I don't see Anthony Weiner being able to recover from his self-imposed scandal. John Liu has his own scandal or two. Bill de Blasio seems to be the person anti-Quinners are turning to, but his ability to excite voters seems in question. While I like what I know about him, I can't help but factor in the enormously positive impact it would have on the world for the country's largest city to have an openly gay person in charge. Christine Quinn is definitely an old-school New York City kind of politician -- and I don't say that as a big compliment -- but she's also fought for many things I do believe in: like expanding affordable housing, preventing teacher layoffs and firehouse closings, and championing the legalization of same-sex marriage. And she's always the first one out there when LGBT people are under attack. I can't help but feel the typical gay cannibalism is starting to set in as she inches closer to her goal, something it seemed gay people were SOOOOO supportive of when she was just the speaker of the City Council. Sure, her lefty Chelsea activist days have faded a bit as she's inched closer to the center to court wider appeal. But has she really changed so much that we want anybody but her, or do we just love to build up our own so we can tear them down?
1 comment:
StV was an affiliate of the medical school where I teach. The hospital had been slowly dying for YEARS, and the Archdiocese was DESPERATE to get out of the health care business. They've also sold off St Clare's and Our Lady of Mercy in the Bronx. They couldn't get a buyer to keep it operating as a hospital, and by 2009, the hospital was hemorrhaging money. Quinn helped the Archdiocese out of bankruptcy proceedings by finding a commercial buyer, but the hospital closure was in no way her fault; it was inevitable.
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