Quinn Struggling To Promote Koch's Never Recorded Endorsement

Ed Koch always knew when to jump on the train, when to time his endorsement and how to expand it in favor of his candidate. Not this time. Days before he died, former Mayor, Ed Koch made an announcement in his hospital room: “I want to help Chris Quinn,” The NY Times reports. But Quinn's campaign failed to meet the deadline of setting up a formula of a new statement on her behalf since Mr. Koch died three days later.

Back in 2011, when Koch first endorsed Ms. Quinn, he had no intention of going anywhere soon. “I’m 87,” Mr. Koch said at the time. “I’m not looking to roll up i.o.u.’s.”

But, apparently, according to the report Ms. Quinn’s campaign never filmed Mr. Koch speaking about the candidate, and there is no prepared advertisement featuring his endorsement. Her team must now rely on television footage and a single fuzzy audio clip, recorded by a campaign staff member in 2011, of the former mayor praising Ms. Quinn at a fund-raiser, where Mr. Koch called her a “rock star.”

There is little doubt that Mr. Koch, would have taken the role of humping on the campaign trail with Ms. Quinn and speak on her behalf everywhere and anywhere. Now, Ms. Quinn is struggling to think of how to utilize an endorsement by a popular and influential advocate who also happens to be deceased.

“There is a way to tastefully and appropriately remind people that Mayor Koch thought that Chris Quinn would make a great mayor,” said Josh Isay, Ms. Quinn’s chief political strategist. But, Mr. Isay added, “we’re not at that point of the discussion.”

Speaking to the NYT, Kenneth Sherrill, a political science professor at Hunter College acknowledged that any use of Mr. Koch in a campaign might be construed as problematic. “If I were running against her, what do you say? ‘How low will she go, six feet under, or more?’ ” he quipped. “The question is, how voters will respond to it, what they will think of a candidate who uses it.”