Even the Best City Hall Partnership Ever Can Have Differences

Bebeto Matthews/Associated Press Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker.

There has never been a mayor and a City Council speaker who have had a better relationship than Michael R. Bloomberg and Christine C. Quinn - ever.

Or so says Ms. Quinn, who, far from distancing herself from a mayor who could be both her biggest asset and her biggest liability in next year's Democratic primary for mayor, embraced him unequivocally on Thursday.

“C'mon! The mayor and I get along fine and great,” she said, responding to reporters' questions at the end of a news conference at City Hall on two bills dealing with immigration. “Mike Bloomberg and I have an outstanding working relationship. I would argue we have the best working relationship of any speaker and any mayor in the history of the city of New York. And that has delivered more results for real New Yorkers than any two administrations, ever.”

Ms. Quinn's effusive praise of the mayor should hardly come as a surprise, given that her campaign strategy includes winning over pro-Bloomberg Democrats. But she has endured a bit of a rough patch in recent weeks, and on Thursday, she fielded questions that focused chiefly on a campaign finance bill that the mayor has blasted because he says it would tear a loophole in the city's election spending rules, and a pedicab bill that he, unexpectedly, opted not to s ign on Wednesday.

At first, Ms. Quinn continued her recent criticism of the Bloomberg administration, even suggesting that the mayor and his staff had not read the campaign finance bill correctly. “If you listen to what the mayor's statements were, they bore no relationship to what's in the bill,” she said.

Ms. Quinn also voiced surprise that the mayor had decided not to sign a pedicab measure intended to help consumers avoid getting cheated, especially because top Bloomberg aides had testified in Council hearings in favor of the bill. “I got no heads-up,” she complained. (In fact, Mr. Bloomberg wound up signing the bill after all, on Thursday, with a spokeswoman explaining that he needed a little time to study it.)

After expressing some unhappiness, Ms. Quinn reverted to form, and joked about how “cute” Mr. Bloomberg looked in a New York Post illu stration about the pedicab bill. And asked whether she and the mayor were still close, Ms. Quinn crossed her fingers and whispered, half-jokingly, “Like this.”