Heard Around Town: Hillary Clinton “the first telephone call” to Quinn after mayoral defeat

Christine Quinn got a shoutout from Hillary Clinton in the presidential candidate’s Vogue interview out this week. “How much do you think the woman thing mattered?” Clinton asked her interviewer, referring to Quinn’s run for mayor in 2013. As the sitting New York City Council Speaker, Quinn was expected to be the leading candidate in the race, but ended up with a disappointing third place in the Democratic primary, apparently hurt by her ties to the Bloomberg administration. “I couldn’t understand it,” Clinton goes on to say of the coverage of Quinn. “She’d been around. It’s not like she came out of nowhere. People knew her. I just thought she was treated really badly.”

So when New York Nonprofit Media's Jeff Stein asked about Clinton’s comments in a video interview on Wednesday, Quinn said she was grateful and called Clinton “exceedingly maternal.”

“When I lost the mayor’s race, the first telephone call that was on my phone was hers,” Quinn said. “You can imagine when you don’t have something you want to succeed work out, you’re not immediately calling people back. And her assistant was calling and calling! It was not going to get past like 10:30 in the morning before I called Secretary Clinton back and she got to hear that I was hanging in there.”

It was not the first time a comparison has been drawn between Clinton and Quinn. A 2013 post from Lisa Miller of New York magazine called Quinn’s loss to now-New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio “reminiscent of another female politician who lost in a 2008 primary to another smooth-talking man with a telegenic family.” Miller also suggested both politicians had to worry about “likability” in a way their male peers did not.

Quinn went on to reiterate her support for Clinton’s presidential run, saying in the Oval Office she will “go on to change people’s lives.” Watch the whole exchange here: