Has the luck of the Irish run out in New York?
Six months ago, this outcome hardly seemed possible, but when she arrived on stage at Chelsea’s Dream Hotel, in her local constituency, just before midnight, and three hours after polls had closed around the five boroughs, it was tempting to conclude that there’ll never be so much as a dying roar to accompany the demise of Irish-America’s political clout in New York.
For so long, Quinn’s ascendancy, seemingly to the highest role in the nation’s biggest city, was a steadily paced coronation, out of step with the normally ruthless speed of careers that rise and fall.
Spring for the Democratic city council speaker — the most powerful role in City Hall — remained hopeful, but her well-backed bid to succeed billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, fizzled out in the long hot summer. Her storybook, immigrant background was not enough.
The evolving city, as one observer noted to the Irish Examiner, had left the tribal mentality behind.
In hindsight, there were many alarm bells, but the blame has been most firmly laid at Quinn’s fateful decision to support the change in the law on mayoral term limits and allow Bloomberg return for a third stint, in 2009.
Outgoing mayor Michael Bloomberg during a visit to Knock Airport in 2007.
The former Republican media mogul had argued that his leadership had needed to continue, if the city were to navigate safe passage through the financial crisis that was still taking shape after the Lehman Brothers implosion, five years ago this weekend.
Bloomberg was ready to return the favour to Quinn, but that very association was her downfall. A lesbian, from the Village, who had an intensely Irish upbringing, was held up as a regrettable symbol of the establishment.
When the pair marched through Breezy Point during St Patrick’s Day festivities, Bloomberg was booed by onlookers disillusioned by a lack of support, post-Hurricane Sandy. Quinn scurried off for a coffee after just three blocks, for fear of being tarred with the same brush.
A savvy politician, Quinn was born in Long Island, but cut her teeth in Greenwich Village as a moderate advocate for gay rights. With one eye on all the other prizes Manhattan had to offer, Quinn always deployed the memory of her Belfast grandmother, who survived the Titanic.
That Quinn was a front-runner for so long was a mark of her pragmatism, but also a reason for many registered democrats to shy away from her and send through the erstwhile underdog from Brooklyn, Bill De Blasio, who will most likely take on, and probably defeat, a Brooklyn-based Republican, Joe Lhota, in the November election.
It’s been more than a half-century since an Irish-American mayor oversaw the world’s most iconic city.
Robert F Wagner Jr, whose mother was born in Cork, was a progressive at a time of great social change, during his office from the mid-1950s to mid-60s, but was out of step with the many counter cultures that dominated the city by the end of his tenure.
Just before him, there was the Mayo-born icon of New York’s Irish community, Mayor William O’Dwyer.
Since then, the electorate has diversified and new immigrant groups have replaced the suburban-bound Irish. And yet, Quinn’s fall was impossible to foresee.
“I’m shocked at how poorly she finished,” said John Murphy, a Wexford-born lawyer, based here for 20 years, who actively supported the Quinn campaign.
“She was a distant third, even though she led for such a long time and was a very strong candidate… It really goes to show that New York’s demographics are changing more than ever. Brooklyn is a more prominent borough, now.”
Bill de Blasio, with his son Dante, daughter Chiara, and wife Chirlane McCray, celebrates his Democratic candidacy for New York mayor
No politics is immune from the overarching power of slick presentation. The key moment for De Blasio was a television ad that almost never saw the light of day.
A black teenage boy, light-skinned, with an irresistibly trendy afro, spoke about his fears of being stopped in the street by police, under Bloomberg’s controversial and draconian stop-and-frisk laws.
Dante was one of many young men from minority backgrounds whose fear and loathing of NYPD harassment struck a chord with the larger community of liberal whites in the outer boroughs, particularly in Brooklyn.
In the ad, Dante, 15, cited reasons to vote for Bill De Blasio, “the only Democrat with the guts to break from the Bloomberg years”: raise taxes on the rich and ensure affordable housing for citizens.
Dante continued: “He’s the only one who will end a stop-and-frisk era that unfairly targets people of colour. Bill De Blasio will be a mayor for every New Yorker, no matter where they live or what they look like.
“And I’d say that even if he weren’t my dad.”
This understated, yet powerful message, delivered by the candidate’s bi-racial son, struck a chord that devastated Quinn’s campaign.
Bloomberg, and others, desperately accused De Blasio of race-baiting, but it was too late in the day and there was no way back.
“Being openly gay probably helped her with a lot of people,” says Murphy. “But De Blasio set up a class warfare — a tale of two cities — and utilised the stop-and-frisk issue to bring out a huge vote from minorities.
“This isn’t news, but the Irish, as a group, have not had a major, regularised presence for many decades. They haven’t had the ability, at the drop of a hat, to mobilise as a unit.
“Christine Quinn was a very strong candidate with big backing, but, at the end of the day, couldn’t rely on that ethnic Irish vote. They didn’t show up. That’s a reality. We have gone down in numbers. We’re more integrated. We don’t speak with one voice, like we used to.
“That’s natural when you have a combination of less people arriving than ever before. It’s not new. It’s just that her poor showing was so pronounced that it symbolised the diminishing of the Irish-American political clout.
“That clout has been gone for a while. I don’t think it’s massively new, but what I think is just shocking is that Christine is such a strong and well-organised candidate and this was the best she could do. That’s unnerving.
“I’m really worried about what happens, now, for Irish groups looking for city or state funding. The mayor of New York is an important person in the state.
“On a national level, you have Martin O’Malley on the shortlist for a 2016 presidential run. But Christine was part of a coming generation.
“Some people would take the sanguine view that this is all insignificant. We’re not a cohesive group, but people are doing well individually. You don’t need to be organised politically. I personally think that’s naive.”
It’s not white Irish Catholics whose influence has diminished. Along with the Italian and Polish Catholics, they are concentrated in enclaves on Staten Island, in relatively far-flung Queens neighbourhoods like Middle Village and Howard Beach, and in Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge.
However, many of them are now registered Republicans and wouldn’t have impacted on her Democratic demise.
A superficial study of the 51 council districts of New York returns only three Irish names: a Sullivan in Brooklyn’s Gravesend; a Crowley in Maspeth, Queens; and a Walsh in Staten Island South.
For Quinn, the groundswell and financial support had been widespread since she decided four years ago to make the leap. Her local, politically active Greenwich Village was as generous as Manhattan’s Upper West and East Sides, with all their liberalism and millions.
According to the New York Times, she made more campaign stops in the Puerto Rican South Bronx than any of her opponents.
She garnered support from Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jews and — most surprisingly — Hasidic Jews, notoriously self-interested voters who will more often than not rule out candidates who don’t conform to their strict moral outlook.
She would only end up securing the votes of the Upper East Side.
The area where Quinn and the Manhattan establishment failed most prominently was in so-called ‘brownstone Brooklyn,’ De Blasio’s patch — middle-class, politically active and liberal without being affluent.
According to the Times, exit polls showed no gender gap in the results. Quinn lost for a number of reasons: “her close association with the incumbent, her rivals’ ability to outmanoeuvre her on the issue of stop-and-frisk policing, and her inability to be a change candidate in an election in which voters sought new direction”.
“Democratic party politics, dominated by men, have been less hospitable for women in New York,” Ester Fuchs, a professor of political science at Columbia, told the newspaper.
Deprived of the women’s vote, the gay vote and a powerful ethnic affiliation, like with Jews or Hispanics, Fuchs said, Quinn was left without a base.
“She’s Irish,” Ms Fuchs said, noting that many Irish voters have left the city. “That was a bigger problem for her than anything.”
One of the many beneficiaries of the Bloomberg/Quinn years is the Irish Arts Center, which is in Hell’s Kitchen, a Manhattan neighbourhood once synonymous with the Irish and, indeed, the area to which Quinn’s grandmother was brought by her brothers once she stepped off the rescue boat in New York
The IAC’s executive director, Aidan Connolly, told the Irish Examiner that while it would have been a point of great pride for the Irish community to have Quinn as mayor, as an institution their scope was more focused on engaging with all the other immigrant groups.
“A lot of political power is about concentration of new immigrants in a new area,” Connolly said. “The Irish have made it. Part of making it is separating yourself from cities and moving to the suburbs.
“There are other, new immigrant populations that are building political power, which is exciting. The city is becoming more politically diverse.
“I don’t know if the Irish vote is less powerful now, but it might be less homogenous. Other blocs of voters are more homogeneous, for whatever reason. Maybe that has something to do with their socio-economic status. It’s an interesting and complicated question.
“I will say that she has been a phenomenally effective Speaker, and she has been extraordinarily supportive of issues that relate to the Irish, immigration and the senior population. Issues that cross ethnic boundaries.
“She, and the mayor, have an incredible legacy of investing in mid-level cultural institutions, not just ours.
“I guess the fact that she wasn’t successful is a function of a lot of different things that don’t have anything to do with her ethnic background and more to do with the voter base: the registered democrats who actually turn out in a mayoral election tend to be a pretty narrow sample.”
Now a prominent lawyer, Brian O’Dwyer, the nephew of the aforementioned Mayor William O’Dwyer, is better placed than most to speculate as to whether or not Quinn’s defeat represents a greater malaise for the Irish community in the city.
“We were obviously great fans of Christine’s,” he said. “We’re disappointed, no question. But I wouldn’t want to characterise it as a defeat for the Irish community, just as I wouldn’t want to see it as a setback for women or the gay community.
“It was an interesting year, really somewhat unusual. But I’m very optimistic that Bill De Blasio will continue to be a friend of the Irish community and the immigrant population at large. I take solace from that. We look forward to working with him.
“Nobody — not even me — understood the depth of dissatisfaction with Mayor Bloomberg. It was, to some extent, an anti-Bloomberg vote. Supporting him through to a third term was a responsible thing for Christine Quinn to do. But four years is a long time in politics and he went from being popular to being very unpopular.
“This town was very, very tired of Michael Bloomberg and almost everyone associated with him, and his administration, paid the price.”
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
