Manhattan President Rivals Emerge
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The job of Manhattan borough president has long been seen as a consolation prize for politicians who couldn’t win the city’s highest office.
Yet Robert Wagner Jr. and David Dinkins used the job as a springboard for greater things, and now the post seems to be enjoying a revival of sorts. It has become attractive to a roster of City Council members and political leaders who either will become casualties to a relatively new term-limits law or hope to raise their profiles.
“With any office that opens up there’s a huge rush because of term limits,” a professor of political science at Baruch College, Douglas Muzzio, said. “It’s a weak office, but it serves as another rung on the political ladder.”
Six aspirants have all but declared their candidacies for the office, which will be vacated next year – as a result of term limits – by C. Virginia Fields, who plans to run in the Democratic mayoral primary.
Council Members Margarita Lopez and Eva Moskowitz both told The New York Sun this week that they plan to announce their candidacies officially next month, and Assembly Members Scott Stringer, Keith Wright, and Adriano Espaillat said they would make it official between now and March. Council Member Bill Perkins and a former city employee, Carlos Manzano, are also planning to enter the fray.
“It’s going to be a very crowded race,” Mr. Stringer, an Upper West Side resident who was re-elected last month to the state Legislature said. “You’re going to have borough-president candidates on every block.”
The director of the Polling Institute at Quinnipiac University, Maurice Carroll, said: “Whoever can turn out a substantial base will win the job. To handicap a race like that you wouldn’t want to put a lot of money on it.”
The candidates run the gamut.
Ms. Moskowitz, who by law need not vacate her council seat until 2009, is chairwoman of the education committee and has made revamping city schools her signature issue.
Ms. Lopez has been an outspoken advocate for affordable-housing and domestic-violence programs. If she wins she would be the first Hispanic woman to hold the office.
Mr. Espaillat, Mr. Manzano, and Ms. Lopez could split the Hispanic vote, and Mr. Wright could split the black vote with Mr. Perkins.
“There are really two of everybody,” Mr. Stringer said, referring to candidates’ ethnicities. “It’s definitely going to be like Noah’s Ark.” He has already raised more than $500,000 for his race.
While the public campaigning has yet to start, the candidates have been raising money and trying to secure endorsements from colleagues and the usual myriad of unions.
Candidates and political analysts said that from a policy standpoint the office resembles a glorified cheerleading job, which the right candidate can use as a bully pulpit and turn into something more.
“The office has changed,” Ms. Moskowitz, who has made no secret of her desire to be mayor one day, said. “There is no disputing that, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be effective.”
The most dramatic change is the dissolving of the Board of Estimate and the Board of Education, bodies that gave borough presidents significant influence over citywide policy.
Mr. Perkins, deputy majority leader of the council, said there was “no question” that the job of borough president has catapulted some people into mayoral races. But he said he hoped to continue focusing on the issues, such as pest control and economic development, that he’s tackled in the council. He also predicted that the race would narrow as the election moved closer.
“As we get closer to the petitioning process and the election, that field will get smaller,” he said.