City pols are just as qualified

There are some, no doubt, who feel that New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn would make a fine presidential or vice-presidential candidate. Well, why not? In the context of Sarah Palin’s emergence from obscurity, the same could be said of any number of politicians here. Adolfo Carrion Jr., for example, who spoke at the recent Irish Echo event at Museum of the City of New York, has gained considerable executive experience since 2001 as borough president of the Bronx -- which has 1.3 million residents.

The GOP vice-presidential candidate took over as the governor of Alaska in December 2006. That’s no mean achievement in any life story, to be sure. But given that she’s the Republicans’ choice to be Dick Cheney’s successor as vice-president, that aspect of her resume seems more than a little skinny. So, the GOP has made much of her previous experience as a mayor. And the media has been very respectful of that, not wishing to be seen to denigrate small-town America. In his recent interview with Palin, ABC’s Charles Gibson repeatedly referred to Wasilla as a city, which is perhaps technically what it is. But it has a fraction the population of most neighborhoods in New York. And Alaska itself, though a huge landmass with the Russian bear apparently breathing down its neck, has rather less people than four of New York City’s five boroughs.

Wasilla had, according to the last census, just over 5,000 residents, though an estimate in 2007 put that figure at just short of 10,000. Compare that with a few neighborhoods in New York that Irish Echo readers are very familiar with. Woodside, which might be the best known, had in the 2000 census 90,200 (including this writer at the time); Astoria 43,605; Sunnyside 29,808; and Maspeth 35,498. At the tip of Manhattan, that once-solidly Irish enclave Inwood had 9,238 people, roughly what Wasilla is said to have now. We don’t have current population estimates for these neighborhoods, but all saw their star rise considerably during this decade’s property boom.

Can anybody argue that a local politician from Astoria, Sunnyside and Woodside -- which has more than 160,000 souls in the most ethnically diverse patch of land on the planet -- would be any less qualified or better equipped to deal with America’s problems than a small-town mayor?