She boasted about how she'd worked with the Mayor to balance the city budgets.
He said the mayor was balancing his popularity among renters with the desires of his landlord campaign contributors.
The confused response put the mayor off balance on an issue, campaign finance, where lately he seemed to have cornered the high ground.
Mayor Giuliani balanced the in-year deficit in just six months, and from that point he produced budget surpluses in every year he was in office.
"It's all a political process anyway," Mr. McKee said, "and thank goodness he's been running for the Senate". He said the mayor was balancing his popularity among renters with the desires of his landlord campaign contributors.
As mayor, Ford balanced budgets by drawing on surpluses, cutting back on services, looking to sell off city assets, and raising property taxes in the midst of Toronto's construction boom.
According to Laurence Msall of the Civic Federation, a watchdog, the mayor has balanced the budget and reduced "scoop and toss" whereby the city pushes its debt-repayment schedule into the future, but Chicago is "far from out of the financial woods" because of the pension time-bomb.
It was Ms. Quinn's first specific pronouncement on education spending since the mayor proposed balancing the books by eliminating 6,100 of the city's 75,000 teaching positions through layoffs and retirements, and it sent a clear signal that big differences remain between the City Council and City Hall when it comes to bridging the city's multibillion-dollar budget gap.
The political tasks of leadership in hard times require a mayor to balance realism about the current crisis with confidence in the future, convincing the public that he is in control, that he has a plan for improvement and is committed to carrying it out.
Since the 1989 City Charter reform enlarged the Council's powers, a strong speaker has been seen as necessary to counterbalance the mayor, but this balance doesn't hold.
