A veteran Democratic operative, Lynch is an ex-deputy mayor and the head of his own political consulting firm, Bill Lynch Associates.

Lynch got his start as a grassroots activist, working as the political director for the New York branch of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. It was in 1984, while working on Jesse Jackson's failed presidential bid, that he first became friends with David Dinkins; when Dinkins was elected Manhattan borough president in 1985, he named Lynch his chief of staff. Four years later, Lynch helped architect Dinkins' successful run for mayor, serving as his deputy mayor and chief political strategist. His coups included getting Nelson Mandela to come to New York in 1991, and bringing the Democratic National Convention to the city the following year; the low point of his tenure was the 1991 Crown Heights riots, which damaged Dinkins' credibility with voters and played a role in Dinkins' loss to Rudy Giuliani in the 1993 race for mayor. Following the defeat, Lynch spent several years as a VP at Ron Ron Perelman's MacAndrews & Forbes. In the late '90s, he founded his own lobbying/consulting group, Bill Lynch Associates.

In recent years, Lynch has lobbied on behalf of corporations (Cablevision), universities (Columbia), real estate developers (Joseph Sitt, political candidates (Freddie Ferrer, Carl MacCall), and labor unions. Lynch is often hired to do damage control, as was the case in 2004 when Nielsen Media called him after word leaked that it had failed to adequately monitor TV viewing in black and Hispanic households. (He arranged for Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton to publicly defend the firm, which dampened the outcry.) [Image via Getty, with Charles Rangel]