With Patience and Fortitude: A Memoir (15 page)

So Kim and I decided to get another dog. As with Andy, our plan was to share parenting with Wayne.

Kim and I went to North Shore Animal League, intending to get a grown dog because we thought that would be easier. But then we saw Sadie, a puppy. She was in the big-dog section because she was a bit sick and needed to be kept away from the other puppies. She was the one. She’s part Shar-Pei and part Lab, so she has excess skin (and had even more as a puppy). She looked so sad and pathetic, curled up in the corner of this huge cage, and so cute with her skin all scrunched up, that we couldn’t resist.

Early on, before Kim and I started living together full time, coordinating the dogs was a little complicated, but within a few months I moved into her apartment on Fifth Avenue in the Village (which was still in my City Council district). Then we moved to my place in London Terrace, a comfortable one-bedroom apartment that was perfect for the two of us and for Andy and Sadie. The big challenge, at least at first, was that Kim is much more organized than I am. When Kim lived alone, she had everything in its place, and that’s where it stayed. And that’s just not at all what I’m like. There’s sense to my order, but it’s not the classic sense of order. Over time I think I’ve helped Kim get less organized, and she’d probably say she’s made me less unorganized.

We fell into an easy routine. It helped that we both had demanding jobs, so the fact that I often had commitments outside regular work hours wasn’t a problem. But we worried about each other, and we still do. Kim worries about things that go wrong with my work and how they’re covered in the press. In politics there’s a lot you can’t control, and things can easily go wrong, and then you have to read about them in the newspaper. That’s one place where we both worry, but despite how upset Kim might feel on my behalf, she works hard at helping me keep things in perspective. That’s good because being Irish, I have a tendency to see everything that goes wrong as the end of the world.

It seems that I have not totally gotten over the sense that when things are going bad, it’s my fault and mine alone. I’m working on it, but even as an adult, I sometimes feel that everything hinges on me doing everything right. Beyond right—perfectly. So when something doesn’t go right, even something simple and insignificant, I can wind up beating myself up. I think it’s a residual effect of my mom being sick when I was a kid. If I had a choice, I’d rather not have these feelings. But since I don’t have a choice, I have come to believe that it makes me a more focused and thoughtful person. At least I hope so.

Kim helps me understand that not everything is my fault or responsibility. Over the dozen years we’ve been together, I’ve come to trust that she often has a better sense than I do of what matters and what doesn’t. She’s not the kind of person who would ever say, “Oh, it doesn’t matter,” because she definitely doesn’t feel that way. She’s very serious about her own work, and when things go wrong, it matters to both of us, but she’s really good at keeping things in perspective and taking the long view and saying, “If it doesn’t work out, we’ll do whatever we want to do.”

By that she means that no matter what happens in our work life, we’ll still have our life together. Sometimes she jokes about wanting to buy a goat farm in Vermont and make cheese, or at least I take it to be a joke. It had better be a joke. Because as difficult as politics can be, and as hard as I can be on myself, there’s no way I’m working on a farm.

C
HAPTER
11

Madam Speaker

I
n 2004 I decided to run for Speaker of the City Council, which is the second-most-powerful elected position in New York City, after mayor. When I look back at my career up to that point, even I’d have to admit that it looks like I’d thoughtfully planned out every step I took, from going to work for Tom Duane, to winning his City Council seat, to getting myself appointed chair of the health committee, to deciding to run for Speaker. But that would give me too much credit. My colleagues know that I’m an insane short-term planner when it comes to plotting out my daily schedule and making sure I’m overprepared. But in a weird way I’m actually not a long-term planner, maybe because I’ve learned that you never know what might happen around the next corner. I often say that my five-year plan is to be thinner, and that’s about it.

Gifford Miller, who was then the Speaker, was running for mayor and couldn’t run for City Council again. So the field for Speaker was wide open. I knew I’d be a very long shot. I didn’t know if I could win, but there was no value in not trying, because not trying doesn’t move you anywhere. Even if I tried and lost, I’d likely be in a better position moving forward. I might get to chair a more influential committee or at least remain health committee chair.

As Speaker you get to work on behalf of the whole city, not just your district and not just whatever’s within the purview of a committee. You also get a great deal of input into the citywide legislative agenda. I’d watched Speaker Miller and Mayor Bloomberg deadlock over any number of issues. If either one had compromised, our city would have been better off, I thought. So my goal as Speaker was not to be in a constant battle with the mayor—it was to accomplish things. But first I’d have to get elected.

It was not a simple matter, of course. People were not shy about telling me that I had no chance of winning. They pointed out the obvious: I am from the West Side of Manhattan—a liberal, a woman, and a lesbian. I was fully aware of all these characteristics when I woke up every morning. At some point in the process, I made an important decision: I decided not to listen to them—“the movers and the drainers,” as my friend Christine calls them. These self-appointed experts don’t help you; in fact, their goal is to hold you back because they don’t have the guts to do what you’re trying to do. I decided to take another tack, taking a cue from a woman on my staff, who puts it perfectly. It doesn’t really matter what the size of the obstacle is, she says; what matters is the angle and speed with which you run to get over it. So I decided to ignore the external and internal naysayers, because sometimes you can be your own worst enemy. I decided to let the people who have a vote in the process speak for themselves.

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.