Bob Hennelly & the 5 Amigos (Updated x 3)



Yesterday evening District Council 37 held a mayoral forum with five Democratic candidates.  We’ll be providing some extended reporting on the forum.

Update #3:  DC 37 endorsed John Liu for mayor on May 29th.  Extended excerpts of John Liu at the mayoral forum are here.

Update #2:  Excerpts showing the discussion on retroactive pay under union contracts are here.

Update:  Here are excerpts showing moderator Bob Hennelly in action.  In this forum, his campaign season premier, he joined the ranks of the 2013 campaign’s most effective moderators.  He skillfully used humor to facilitate the discussion, kept it moving while allowing time for substantive answers and interacted with a very engaged audience.  Unlike many moderators, he began with his own impassioned description of the state of the city as Mayor Bloomberg’s term comes to an end.

Our initial clip covers a question, and full answers, on a proposal to allow non-citizens to vote.  The exchange illustrates several features of last night’s forum:  host Bob Hennelly’s use of humor to effectively facilitate the discussion while keeping it moving, the candidate’s attempts, some humorous, to engage the audience, in this case with their widely varying spanish language skills, John Liu running to the left of the more measured Bills (Thompson and de Blasio) and a very engaged audience which at the start of this question objected to the questioner speaking in spanish rather than english.