Maura Keaney

One of Christine Quinn’s spokesman has taken a leave of absence and is now the interim director of communications for Democrat Mike McMahon’s Congressional campaign.

The spokesman, Anthony Hogrebe, was listed as the contact on a campaign press release announcing that McMahon has been endorsed by the United Federation of Teachers, which, according to the release, has 12,000 members in the district. McMahon is seeking to win the seat currently occupied by Vito Fossella, who is not running for reelection.

In a public statement, UFT's president, Randi Weingarten, said McMahon "is a champion for children and working people."

Before joining Quinn’s operation, Hogrebe worked on Gifford Miller’s 2005 mayoral campaign.

In other Quinn staffing news, her chief of staff, Maura Keaney, is expected to return from maternity leave in early September, according to another Quinn spokesman.

As the media fades to irrelevance in the last days of the campaign, the people who matter are the ones doing Get Out the Vote, GOTV to the insiders.

And a major Bloomberg campaign player who has, until now, escaped notice is Maura Keaney. On loan from the union UNITE HERE, she's running Mike's GOTV operation, playing a similar (if better-funded) role to 1199's Patrick Gaspard on the Ferrer campaign.

Her low-profile spot running an election day operation expected to include about 10,000 people (not the 50,000 number the campaign touts, but still a lot) says some interesting things about labor politics.

For one thing, her union, UNITE-HERE, has quietly become a more important political force in the city than it gets credit for.

"We don't have a process, as some unions do, about generating a lot of press about the numebrs we have," the union's chief of staff, Chris Chafe, says. "We just put our shoulders into it and get it done."

It's also a reminder that, for all the (accurate) reports of the decline of labor, unions are still the masters of GOTV. Keaney's working for Mike under ex-1199er Patrick Brennan.  read more »

And, as Chafe notes, Keaney's and Gaspard's roles are a sign of the strength of the Change to Win unions, which include SEIU and UNITE HERE, and which recently split from the AFL-CIO.