>What qualities does she lack generally that would benefit a mayoral candidate?

Not saying she lacks it, I'm saying that she's not shown anything besides being a good manager of a team of auditors. Her position doesn't really address the other parts of being a mayor, including aligning an entirely self-serving city council to do good work. At the very least, if we want to point to the last two universally effective mayors (Nutter and to some extent Rendel), they were able to if not get support, get their shit passed working through the council. As far as we can tell from her press history, the difference between her and Butkovitz is that she's all about shining a light on problems, but that's a good feature for the Controller, that could burn bridges as the mayor.

Certainly, you do want some qualities of a bridge burner as the mayor, but you still need to work with the other elected and appointed positions, and while you CAN constantly embarrass them in the press, you're going to find yourself with no support next time you want to fix that police contract.

>Compared with the current administration (and, for funsies, a hypothetical Republican challenger a la Billy Ciancaglini), where are her shortcomings?

Didn't say she had shortcomings, I'm saying we don't actually know what she's capable of, but her fanboys/girls seem to already anoint her the best possible candidate.

A good comp on how i see this are famous food critics. We love a good food critic, telling us where the best restaurants are, and why this dish is really well made, or not well made. We love food critics for their writing, but what happens if a food critic becomes a restaurant owner? Certainly that food critic knows good food, but does that critic know how to hire and keep a staff, procure good produce on a regular basis within budget, plan and setup a good facility? And yes, there have been instances in which food critics are actually found to be good restauranteurs, but plenty of them also fuck it up when their job was more than eating and writing about food.