It is an early iteration of the 2013 mayor's race, but City Council Speaker Christine Quinn's upcoming State of the City speech is more than that, says Chris Smith:

Is she distancing herself at all from Mike Bloomberg? How much is she pandering to the constituencies she’ll need in a crowded Democratic primary, like the business community? That analysis is entirely appropriate, because the jockeying by Quinn and the many other mayoral aspirants — including Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, Congressman Anthony Weiner, former comptroller Bill Thompson, and current comptroller John Liu — is well under way. Yet Quinn’s speech deserves to be taken somewhat at face value, too, because among the platitudes, her four previous SOS’s as council speaker have contained an unusually high number of actual smart ideas — things that haven’t simply sounded good on the podium only to be promptly forgotten the next day.