Let’s face it: there are three guys who call the shots in the Legislature, the famous “three men in a room”; the governor, the speaker of the Assembly and the Senate majority leader. If a freshman legislator wants to get the attention of his constituents and the state media, he has to do something that will make people look up and say, “Golly gee whiz, Martha, look at that.”

That is exactly what Assemblyman Sean Hanna, an obscure upstate freshman legislator has done. He has proposed that the members of the state Legislature take a whopping cut in pay and show up for a much shorter session. Of course that isn’t going to happen. In fact, legislators are always sniffing around for more pay, something their constituents hate. So when Hanna comes along and proposes that they give up around a third of their $79,500 (before perks) income, he will be about as welcome as a skunk in the basement.

I suspect, however, that Hanna is no hero. That’s because the devil is in the details. In order to get their previous raises and keep the good government groups off their backs, legislators had to give up much of their license to steal honestly. There are now all kinds of rules about what they can and can’t do. For example, they can’t appear before state agencies representing legal clients and they must—to a degree—disclose how much income they are getting from outside sources.

According to Hanna, if they took less pay, they could be more productive as good private sector citizens. Presumably, then, some of the rules would have to be relaxed.

If you asked the citizens of this state whether stripping their legislators of a good chunk of their pay is a good idea, they would overwhelmingly say yes. After all, poll after poll shows that people hate the Legislature. Many people think that their legislators work far less than full time and make a lot of money on the outside from law and consulting practices.

In that they are correct. These legislators, who only show up in Albany for a few days a week between January and June or July, believe they deserve the hundred grand that most of them are now getting. They will talk to you about all the time they are in their offices and the time they devote to their communities. In some cases that is true, but I daresay in most it is not. These folks have a lot of staff to do much of the scut work while they are out working at their other jobs.

I fear Hanna is offering us a poison pill. I suspect he wants to go back to the good old days when no eyebrows were raised about conflicts of interest.

Even though his plan won’t happen, it is still worth thinking about. Many people wonder why we even need a Legislature, since only three people are calling the shots and the others are playing make-believe. The Legislature is a play in which everyone should have a part. If you ask the leaders and their members about any of this, they will tell you that they are giving their leaders instructions about what to do. That is, of course, nonsense.

Right now, Shelly Silver and Dean Skelos are negotiating with Gov. Andrew Cuomo about all kinds of things. When those negotiations are complete, they will go back to their various conferences and say, “Well, ladies and gentlemen, I did the best I could,” and their conferences will eat what they have been given to eat. But don’t let anyone tell you that these people are in charge. They are happy to have their jobs and when they die, they will have their titles on their tombstones.

Good try, Hanna. Enjoy your 15 minutes and thank you for the proposal.

Alan S. Chartock is president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and an executive publisher at The Legislative Gazette.

By Alan S. Chartock

The first thing the new governor has to do is to get the state’s fiscal house in order. That must happen immediately because in a year, the state’s election cycle will start all over and if Andrew Cuomo waits until then, it will be too late. Cuomo is lucky because as a political genius, he has rounded up the two most powerful publishing magnates in New York: Rupert Murdoch and Mort Zuckerman, the billionaires who, by ordering up editorials in the New York Post and Daily News, can make or break a politician. These two men will back Cuomo on his rush to fiscal austerity and will punish him if he waivers on his “New Democrat” principles.

Cuomo has to submit a budget that will make everyone who depends on government weep. We are talking about, among other things, class sizes in our schools, depletion of the state’s civil service ranks, pension and Medicaid reform. Not-for-profit agencies will suffer great reductions because the Legislature and its infamous member items will not be permitted the largesse of the past. If Cuomo wants to be president of the United States, he will have to convince the rest of the country that he means to be the bluest of blue dog Democrats. He’ll have to be ruthless. As the famous political operative, college professor and lobbyist Norman A. Adler said of Andrew in the New York Times, “He didn’t ream people out. He’d cut your legs and knees off while you were sleeping.”

So what do you do if you are a union leader in New York? You spend what dollars you have screaming that Cuomo is a sell-out to the working people. You buy TV ads that show mental patients languishing in closed wards. You show crowded schoolrooms and a child with tears in her eyes because she doesn’t have books. This time, because union leaders’ survival will be at stake, the union PR campaign will be extremely tough. There is a lot of money left in the Cuomo campaign accounts. Thanks to his Republican opponent Carl Paladino, Cuomo didn’t spend what he might have spent in a tougher race. If he needs to, he’ll buy his own ads to counter those of the unions and he’ll have those powerful newspapers behind him writing supportive stories that make light of the unions. Even the New York Times, which seems deeply suspicious of Cuomo, will have to go along. It isn’t as if they haven’t had to learn the hard way themselves about fiscal austerity and cutting back. The usual groups that descend on Albany in an annual pilgrimage will be told “no.” The union leaders will make a show of it but they will know that as the ranks of their members are thinned, those who are out and who are the most furious will not get a vote. Only the ones left standing will determine the fate of the leaders.

As always, the people who are most dependent on government will be hurt the most. The truth is that these folks vote the least and will be asked to take a disproportionate share of the pain. The new Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives will have a huge say in the federal budget negotiations, and when blue-state New York makes its case, it will be told to drop dead. Of course, real political courage will be in short supply. Shelly Silver will fight like hell for those in his Democratic conference who understand what the political consequences of the cutbacks in their districts will be. But even Shelly will know that the cupboard is bare and the most he will be able to fight for will be table scraps.

Cuomo will say—and mean—“No new taxes.” Shelly will fight for “revenue enhancers.” The line will be held and Shelly will have to compromise. Many people, including a lot of sacred cows, will be hurt. When the smoke clears, you will see a leaner, meaner state bureaucracy, but you will also see closed parks, schools and rest stops. There is no way out.

Now Cuomo has to govern. In a strange way, he also got lucky because of the fiscal mess the state is in. Right now, things are really bad in New York State. There is a huge structural deficit. New York can’t print money like the federal government, so the deficit has to be addressed. The Democrats know it, the Republicans know it, Sheldon Silver, the powerful Assembly Speaker, knows it and certainly Andrew Cuomo knows it.
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Alan S. Chartock is president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and an executive publisher at The Legislative Gazette.

By Alan S. Chartock

If there is a single thing we saw in this year’s election cycle, it is the futility of incredibly long campaigns that last, sometimes, for years. Some may argue the point, saying that you have to “stage” an election and that the millions of dollars and huge numbers of hours that are devoted to the campaigns pay dividends. To counter that idea, consider the possibility that voters are really not all that stupid and sometimes actually know what they want. In this case, they didn’t make up their minds until the very last week of the campaign. They are even able to decide which of the lesser of two evils they are willing to put up with. Andrew Cuomo was a central figure throughout the process. Carl Paladino self-destructed and lost his angry edge when he went too far. Still, despite his gaffes and considering all the tabloid attacks in the New York Post and the Daily News, he did extraordinarily well, proving that homophobia and racism still sell.

Cuomo must have had an awful lot of people thinking about him with reservations. I suspect that part of the reason why Republican Comptroller candidate Harry Wilson and Republican Attorney General hopeful Dan Donovan did so well, closing like crazy at the end of the election cycle, was that people wanted someone looking over Andrew’s shoulder. Nor was Cuomo particularly helpful to either Democratic Attorney General candidate Schneiderman or incumbent Democratic Comptroller Tom DiNapoli. At least one insider suggested to me that Andrew wants in with the millionaires club—Rupert Murdoch, Michael Bloomberg and Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman—in order to move on to the presidency.

The races for District Attorney and Comptroller told us a lot about voter attitudes. I sat on a panel of questioners for one of the debates between Dan Donovan, the Republican District Attorney from Staten Island, and Eric Schneiderman, the brilliant lawyer and State Senator. Schneiderman had an expansive view of the DA’s office; he would continue in the tradition of Andrew Cuomo, whom he called the “Sheriff of Wall Street” (that was actually Spitzer’s title). Schneiderman was endorsed by the New York Times, and Donovan by the New York Post. Harry Wilson, the Republican candidate for Comptroller, was endorsed by most of the major editorial boards. With all that going against him, it was extraordinary that Tom DiNapoli, a very nice man, did as well as he did. His opponents tried their best to tie him to the disgraced Alan Hevesi and to Speaker Sheldon Silver who appointed him to a thankless job in a time of lean when all pension funds took a major hit. The degree of momentum Wilson had going for him toward the end was fascinating because almost no one knew who he was.

One didn’t need a crystal ball to see what happened in the State Senate coming. The unhappy and frustrated voters of Long Island and Westchester threw out the Democrats in the last election cycle. The momentum continued in this election. There were enough marginal Senate Democrats to make a difference this contest. It didn’t help the Democrats that their performance has been terrible since they took control two years ago. It was as if they were taking instructions from “Loser Central.” The middle-class voters didn’t trust them and they only have themselves to blame for their problems.

As one friend put it, “They were like kids in a candy store, stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down.” I responded, “More like thugs in a candy store.”

The fact that State Inspector General Joe Fisch came out with a blockbuster report damning the way in which the big Aqueduct gambling contract was awarded didn’t help inspire any appreciation for them. Senate Republican Leader Dean Skelos had to have been kneeling by his bed, praying, “Dear God, please let these people keep behaving as badly as they are.”

People took a long time to make up their minds, but in the end, they tried to balance their bets. Unfortunately, my bet is that nobody learns anything from what we’ve just seen.
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Alan S. Chartock is president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and an executive publisher at The Legislative Gazette.

By Alan S. Chartock

Everyone wants to know whether Carl Paladino can really be elected Governor. The answer is yes, he can. That is astounding to everyone who thinks he is a mad, crazy, Tea Party kind of guy—a rip-off artist who has made tons from government programs while preaching the gospel of fiscal conservatism. You can pick and choose among all the reasons not to vote for the guy, but recent polls show that Paladino is moving up. How can that be when the newspapers are doing one exposé or editorial after another about him? Of course, newspapers are not well thought of. We have seen several polls indicating that journalists enjoy widespread contempt.

How is it that when Andrew Cuomo is doing the right thing by not getting down in the mud with the guy, Paladino’s numbers keep going up? The respected Marist Poll shows him 15 points behind among likely voters.

Things get stranger and stranger. I have a friend who makes his living selling legal guns. He tells me that he is voting for Andrew Cuomo. He says that the other guy is just too crazy. That would fly in the face of the rising poll numbers for Paladino. The secret, of course, is that the middle-class voter sees the “system” as conspiring against them. All they know is that no matter who is in power, they are the ones getting screwed. Their taxes are going up, their schools are characterized as not working, too many of their politicians are on the take and the in-groups in the legislature are more concerned about preserving their status than about helping the people. What’s more, voters are feeling more and more that they are being “played.” They get two choices, Republicans or Democrats, and no matter who is in office, things seem to stay the same.

People want to know why media magnate Rupert Murdoch, a fiscal conservative, is backing Andrew Cuomo and has been since the Attorney General got into the race. They are genuinely puzzled about the fact that Murdoch is supporting the son of Mario when he did more than anyone else to get Mario out of office in 1994. A few potential answers to the puzzle are that Andrew has been moving seriously to the right; Murdoch’s kids seem to have far more social conscience than he does; and Cuomo senior saved the New York Post when he supported giving Post owner Rupert a waiver on the prohibition against owning both a newspaper and a television station in the same market.

The better answer is that we have no idea. It could just be, as Woodrow Wilson once said, “…secret agreements secretly arrived at” (implicitly or explicitly). That’s why it was no surprise that one of Murdoch’s top political guys, Frederic U. Dicker, got in the face of Paladino and started the “War of Two Mutts” that was seen on TV and heard around the world on virtually every radio station. Dicker has done this kind of gonzo journalism again and again and it always gets the desired results. But let’s just remember who is pressing the Dicker buttons.

Many journalists know that the in-your-face Dicker performance was unprofessional but they supported him anyway, so threatening is Paladino, the rogue politician. So Joe Shmoe, living in Levittown and madder than hell about everything, may just want to send a message. Joe’s, “Get off my back. Get away from me. Go away!” may be just like Paladino’s, “I’m madder than hell and you should be, too!” message. It will not be the first time in history that someone has fallen for the off-the-wall politico message. When people get angry enough they just say, “Nothing can be worse than this.”

Andrew is between a rock and a hard place. If he comes out and fights Paladino, he is the old “Bully Boy” Andrew, and if he takes the reasonable path and doesn’t fight, he is disdained for not being combative enough. As of now, he seems to be holding his fire but if the polls continue to narrow, Andrew may have to come out and fight. That would mean debating, which is something he clearly does not want to do because it gives the man the Daily News calls “Crazy Carl” an even bigger platform. These are very dangerous times. The voters are in a state of near rebellion against what they think is a rigged system and that’s why Paladino could win. It all depends on just how angry and fed up they are.

Sad.
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Alan S. Chartock is president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and an executive publisher at The Legislative Gazette.

By Alan S. Chartock

OK, let’s play war games—Paladino versus Cuomo. You are sitting around the war room table in both camps.

If you are Andrew, do you debate? (Not unless Paladino is coming on strong and then only very early or very late in the game.) Do you fight back against dirty ads? (Yes, you answer his stuff before it begins to stick to you, especially if he is vulnerable to many of the same charges.) Do you take him seriously even though he seems to be a clown? (You bet you do, considering how he decimated his opponent in the Republican primary.)

If you are Paladino, you also have decisions to make. Do you keep throwing rotten eggs in every direction? (Hey, it’s worked up until now.) Do you keep making pledges you can’t possibly keep, like cutting taxes to the bone and putting term limits on state legislators? (Yes, even though you know full well that the Legislature is not about to help you.) Do you keep attacking programs for the poor and educational programs? (Of course you do, that’s what got you this far.) Do you attack the press who are attacking you? (Yep, polls show that people hold the press in very low regard, somewhere around the level of skunks and dangerous reptiles. Plus, what do you have to lose? They’re all against you anyway.)

Andrew’s father, Mario, once told me that the mark of a great politician is the ability to think six moves ahead.

“Anyone can think one or two moves in advance,” said Cuomo the Elder, “but you’ve got to be good to think six moves ahead.” He went on to explain that if someone hits you, you’ve got to decide whether to hit back, and if he hits you again and again, you have to figure out what your strategy should be.

Of course, there are imponderables in all of this. What the political scientists call “intervening variables” will dictate how you conduct your political war. In this run-off, the intervening variables are just how angry the electorate is and just how amused they are by Paladino. I know from interviewing him on several occasions that the man has no real boundaries and he will do whatever he can to win. He is capable of playing fast and loose with the truth. Of course, he isn’t the only politician to do that.

Since he declared his candidacy, Paladino has hit a nerve with the major New York City dailies. To put it mildly, they don’t like him. The Daily News ran a full-page headline: “Meet Crazy Carl.” The Post seems to have reached an agreement with Cuomo and has unleashed their top political guns against Paladino. The New York Times editorialized in favor of the Republican establishment Lazio, who was soundly, overwhelmingly and unpredictably (the polls got it all wrong) beaten. So what’s going on?

First and foremost, everyone believes that the government is broken and needs to be fixed. The middle class perceives that it is being screwed and they respond negatively to the idea that the poor are being helped. They see themselves as paying for things like Medicaid programs that benefit others. Because the middle class votes, you can expect the Paladino war room geniuses to capitalize on that discontent. Sure, the poor vote too, but their numbers are not enough to carry an election. Thus, the poor become Paladino’s target.

Then there is racism, which goes hand in hand with the anti-poor message. When a candidate puts out an email with racist messages, gets caught and defends himself by saying that he was “…only passing it on,” you had better consider the possibility that he damned well knew what he was doing. The only other possible alternative was that he was just stupid. This multi- multi- multi-millionaire didn’t gain his wealth by being stupid.

So why did the pollsters get it wrong when they predicted that the Paladino-Lazio Republican primary was too close to call? When you are a candidate of hate, many people won’t tell the truth to their pollster or their mother. They may like Paladino, but they know better than to say it out loud. That’s going to be a challenge for the Cuomo forces. For his part, Andrew continues to move right on the political spectrum. He is saying all the politically fashionable things about government spending. The question is whether people will believe him or whether they will see him as Mario II. Look for his ads to differentiate between him and Papa.

This is gonna be a humdinger.

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Alan S. Chartock is president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and an executive publisher at The Legislative Gazette.

By Alan S. Chartock

If you were Andrew Cuomo, who would you rather run against: Rick Lazio, the Republican middle-of-the-roader who is as American as apple pie and Howdy Doody, or his conservative, tea-partyish opponent, Carl Paladino? Cuomo is beating the stuffing out of both of them in the polls. You can be sure that this question is being discussed a lot in the Cuomo organization and between Papa and Junior Cuomo.

Lazio is the old, moderate, New York Republican. The former Long Island Congressman couldn’t be nicer. He’s earned his living, post-Congress, as a corporate senior official. His problem is that he hasn’t earned enough to finance his own campaign, which Republicans need to do these days. If I’m Andrew Cuomo, having raised millions of dollars from the usual suspects, I am very happy about the prospect of running against Lazio. Cuomo must believe that no matter what happens, Lazio won’t raise enough money and will never have the funds to mount a credible campaign. Nor will he have a personality transplant and become mean enough to really come after the Attorney General. And no matter what happens in the Republican primary—even if Lazio wins—Paladino will run on another line. Andrew has got to love that.

Of course, if Paladino wins the primary, Lazio will toe the conservative line and history tells us that you can’t win squat in New York as a Republican unless you have both the Republican and Conservative lines. Andrew must like that a lot.

Cuomo has to assume that Lazio is a sure loser. Paladino is a wild card. He’s meaner than a junkyard dog and he’s spoiling for a fight. While he says that he is not a billionaire, he has enough millions to buy whatever he needs to win. He did what he had to do to collect enough signatures to get on the Republican primary ballot. You have to assume he hired the best and the brightest to get that onerous job done. He told me that he has already spent a measly two of the 10 million dollars he has committed to the campaign.

My thinking is that Paladino, with his incendiary right-wing rhetoric, is banking on the fact that this will be another year like 1994, the year of the so-called “Gingrich Revolution.” The American people will be so frightened by the lagging recession, immigration hysteria, gay marriage hysteria and all the other hysterias, they will slam on the political brakes and yell at the top of their lungs, “Enough!” That, after all, is how Gingrich took over the last time and it’s why Papa Mario lost. That’s how people like Jesse “The Body” Ventura got elected as a long, long shot in Minnesota. In order to get elected governor, Paladino is pushing every button, from the great Mosque debate to his conviction that too many poor people are getting too much from the middle class.

So if you’re Cuomo, you’re probably more afraid of the Paladino candidacy than of the prospect that Lazio will be your opponent. What do you do? Of course you say, “I’m staying out of this,” but in some way, you have to find those mechanisms to help Lazio. It could be simple stuff, like getting your friends on editorial boards to endorse Lazio. For example, look for Cuomo backer and Republican Rupert Murdoch to support the more milquetoast Lazio. That will be a sure sign of what Andrew wants. Or Andrew could start to treat Lazio as if he were the more fearsome potential opponent.

Naturally, Andrew would not want to get caught meddling in the other party’s selection process, so if he did anything, he would have to be circumspect. Surrogates must be enlisted to do the dirty work. Everything will be put under a microscope so each option has to be carefully thought through. Paladino is flogging the Ground Zero Mosque issue just as hard as he can, so even if Andrew does the right thing and announces his support for building it, he’ll do so in the most muted terms.

Hey, politics is a tough game and the Cuomos cut their eyeteeth on this kind of 3-dimensional chess.

To answer the original question, Cuomo has got to be more for a Lazio candidacy than a Paladino attempt. Indeed, Paladino may self-destruct and become a laughingstock, but it is also possible that the politics of frustration might give him a chance. Remember how scared people get in dire economic times? Read your history and see just how worried FDR was about some of the nuts that were
running against him.

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Alan S. Chartock is president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and an executive publisher at The Legislative Gazette.

By Alan Chartock

Remember Nelson Mandela and his concept of “truth and reconciliation”?

In politics, you never know what’ll catch fire. Right now, it’s the mosque near Ground Zero. If you listen to right-winging, Republican gubernatorial hopeful Carl Paladino, the Ground Zero mosque is an affront to all Americans and more specifically to the Americans and foreigners killed in that awful attack. Furthermore it is a jab in the eye of the American people because, the multi-millionaire candidate says, the people who are putting up the mosque are “jihadists,” the very group of people responsible for bringing down the World Trade Center towers.

According to Paladino, jihadists are the people who flew planes into the buildings and who want to cause incredible harm to all of us. He is not alone in his opposition—some of the relatives, but certainly not all, of those killed in the attacks are opposed, as is the Anti-Defamation League, a major Jewish organization that usually speaks out for religious tolerance and understanding. Paladino and people like Pat Buchanan want to know where the money to build “Cordoba House” is coming from. Clearly, there is a suggestion that it is coming from the very Muslims who want to kill us. But, as with almost everything, there is another side to all of this.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and a lot of New York clergy, including several prominent rabbis, believe that New York has to be receptive to all religions and that’s the very thing terrorists are against. They believe that constitutionally mandated religious tolerance is at stake. These good people reject the Paladino line that is clearly intended to scare the stuffing out of New Yorkers. The Bloomberg view of religious diversity and tolerance is precisely the kind of thing that New Yorkers, real New Yorkers, have always subscribed to.

Put another way, if New Yorkers don’t understand the intellectual issue here, no one will. We all know the maxim that if you make an exception and allow the government to pick on one religion, there will be no stopping the power of the government from picking on any religion. Surely, every religious and ethnic group—including Jews and Irish and Italians—should know this. Our parents and grandparents faced it. Every group was called names when they got here. We were all “the enemy.” Even Paladino, who is busy tossing this red meat to the lions, is forced to acknowledge that more than 99 percent of Muslims are good people. He says that the “jihadists” putting up the proposed mosque have named it “Cordoba House” because of the tension between Christians and Muslims in Cordoba.

Such towering intellects as former Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin have sided with the anti-mosque crowd. No matter how much those who want to put up the mosque claim that they see this project as a way to bring people together; to leave no one out and to honor those who were killed in the 9/11 attacks, there will be fear-mongers ready to exploit the situation. They say that those flying the planes will be honored in the mosque and we hear that the mosque and others like it will be used to train future terrorists. There is no substantiation to this but rumors continue unabated. Too many people are ready to hear this.

There are more than a billion Muslims. Even the vitriolic, fear-mongering Paladino admits that most of these people are good. The more we discredit the religion, the more we alienate the entire faith, the more of these people we will drive away. Michael Bloomberg’s eyes welled up with tears the other day as he argued that those Americans killed on 9/11 should be remembered for dying in the name of religious tolerance and that the murderers who brought down the towers were an affront to that tolerance. Mike Bloomberg is obviously a hero for being a leader and a teacher, and those who understand that are also to be honored. Those who don’t understand the true meaning of the First Amendment are helping to undermine this country and what it has always stood for. That’s a mistake. n
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Alan S. Chartock is president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and an executive publisher at The Legislative Gazette.

By Alan Chartock

The more we watch these powerful folks in politics, the clearer it is that many of their actions can be explained by “rationalization,” the term we all learned back in our basic Psychology 101 course. For example, when Charlie Rangel is accused of not paying his taxes after having written much of the tax code, or Eliot Spitzer consorts with prostitutes after he wrote and enforced many of the laws against “Johns,” we ask ourselves how they could be so stupid. Or when former Republican Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno skirts the ethical line by selling a nearly worthless nag as a way of having a business associate funnel money to him, we shake our heads and wonder what he could have been thinking.

The answer, I am convinced, is that they truly do not believe they are doing anything wrong. Any lie detector read-out would indicate they were telling the truth when they insisted they had done nothing wrong. Some have described this self-deception phenomenon as a sense of entitlement. Some suggest that when you get very powerful, you think you are owed something by the rest of society. I’ve seen this kind of arrogance in politicians up close and personal, time and again.

Speaker Sheldon Silver says that his house passed a very strong ethics bill that, for some reason, was vetoed by Governor Paterson. The bill was vetoed because it had enough loopholes to drive a semi-truck through. The people deserve to know where every penny a legislator raises comes from. Shelly Silver and his colleagues don’t like that. If that had been part of the ethics bill, the governor would have signed it.

The very powerful seem to act as though the laws are for other people. I know many of these people fairly well and, more often than not, I really like them. They are real characters. Sometimes they spring at you like a Damon Runyon character from Guys and Dolls. When you speak to them, they are just like us. They have foibles. They are human. They have a sense of humor. They have good and not so good sides to them. In some cases, they have flirted with legal prohibitions and enter into a state of denial. In others, they fool themselves on policy matters.

These days, it is fashionable in some reform quarters to speak of Shelly Silver, the top guy in the New York State Assembly, as if he is the devil himself. His former chief of staff, Pat Lynch, is now one of the most important lobbyists in Albany. The word on the street is that if you want something from Shelly, you hire Pat Lynch, his former, most trusted aid. In Albany, true or not, perception is everything. Perception gets lobbyists hired.

When I recently asked Shelly whether lobbyists in Albany are too powerful, he answered that he can show us good laws like “Leandra’s Law,” which was pushed by citizen lobbyists and makes it a felony to drive intoxicated with children in your car. Hey, come on now, Shelly, there is a huge difference between the big boys and girls who push the laws and funnel money to the legislators for their election campaigns and the few good government types who occasionally get a win to make the Legislature smell good.

When I asked the Speaker about the law that the Governor and the Senate are pushing that would “empower” SUNY, he seemed dead set against it. He says, and he is again right, that every time you raise tuition, a young person will be denied the American dream. Under the “Empowerment Act,” SUNY schools and presumably City University schools will be given the power to raise tuition for their schools and will, presumably, be allowed to keep the increase to run their schools.

The problem is that we are in really tough times. The State University has been slashed terribly. To keep the University viable, it makes sense to allow the schools to raise tuition. Otherwise the great SUNY and CUNY systems are truly doomed. The Speaker has the power to make sure that those with the least are given tuition assistance (TAP) funds.

All this proves that both politically and substantively, our public officials are human and can get it wrong.

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Alan S. Chartock is president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and an executive publisher at The Legislative Gazette.

By Alan Chartock

OK, class, let’s talk about pork. Pork, of course, is not kosher. Like many, I suspect one of the reasons it was listed in the biblically proscribed list was that if not properly handled, it caused diseases like trichinosis. Once that worm got into your system, you could die from it.

I tell you all of this since there is another kind of pork—that which exists in politics and abounds in New York, where the Legislature has given away more and more money each year. The party in power gets more of this pork (so-called projects and special member items) to give away than the minority party. It’s a big part of the Incumbent Protection Law (IPP) that I’ve been writing about for years. Even those from minority party districts are given a few pieces of bacon or ham to dispense. Clearly, everyone is in on the game. One of the ways that leaders keep control is by strategically giving pork to the more compliant legislators. As Bessie Smith once sang, “There are lots of ways to sell it, baby.”

This year is different because there really is no extra money to give away. The little boy who cried wolf has finally gotten his comeuppance. This time the wolf is at the door, ready to devour the body politic. We all hate the concept of pork, as some important legislators give away vast amounts of public dollars to ensure their own reelections. I always said that if Joe Bruno, former Mr. Big of the New York State Senate, gave one more thing to the city of Troy, the whole place would sink. Some politicians who give away pork are flat-out crooks. They channel pork to projects where they will personally benefit. There are various federal and state investigations looking into the way in which Pedro Espada, the Majority Leader of the Senate, has directed his member items to institutions in which he has a financial stake. This year, he became such an embarrassment to his fellow Democrats in the Senate that they are trying (surely futilely) to bar him from the party.

For his part, Governor Paterson just vetoed thousands of legislative member items because the State Senate would not pass a constitutionally required balanced budget. New Yorkers and their newspapers have wildly applauded his moves. Meanwhile, back in legislators’ individual districts, there is consternation because many of the member items like parks, swimming pools and ball fields that were promised to the constituents now won’t be funded. So, on a local level, some people are really angry, but if you polled the whole state and asked whether pork or member items should be cut from the budget, the answer would undoubtedly be a resounding yes. Why? Because most people don’t like the idea that some districts get goodies that others do not. In other words, if you are going to build a ball field in one district because the legislator asking for it has clout, it doesn’t seem fair to other districts with less powerful legislators. It really isn’t fair and that’s why David Paterson is getting huge backing from editorial boards and citizens alike. He may be late to the game, having delivered a fair amount of pork himself while in the State Senate, but he is doing the right thing.

The problem for the last several governors is that the whole member item thing has gotten completely out of control. They kept asking for more and more member items until the stink has gotten so bad that they had to put minimal controls on the process of handing them out. But, as we can see from the Espada case, where there is a will to pig out, there is a way to make pork.

During times like these when the larder really is empty, it seems like good and reasonable reforms are in order. This is the year of pork reform and legislators are just going to have to suck it up and learn how to behave. Of course, if they do pass a balanced budget, does anyone want to bet that David Paterson will allow them their self-serving pork, and that when they get it (and eat it), they and their constituents may be eaten from the inside by the trichinosis organism? Let’s get politically kosher.
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Alan S. Chartock is president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and an executive publisher at The Legislative Gazette.

By Alan S. Chartock

When I issued my New Year’s predictions, I stated unequivocally that former Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno, 81, would not see a day of jail time. Now that the Supreme Court of the United States has made it clear that they have no confidence in the overly broad federal “Theft of Honest Services Law,” it appears more certain than ever that my prediction is coming true.

We saw during the Bruno prosecution that the Justice Department seems sick and tired of the immoral (if not illegal) self-seeking schemes of Congress and the New York State Legislature. Many of these legislators run what are called “pay to play” operations. Since the Legislature, for example, is not supposed to be a full time operation even though they make full time salaries, some members set up “consulting companies” as a separate business. If you want access to the legislator, you hire him or her as a consultant. You’d have to be pretty dumb not to understand how that works. Of course, these consultant operations are just one way to divert money from the public coffers to legislators who want to sell their influence. Lawyers, real estate brokers and insurance people have been known to do the same thing.

My sense is that U.S. Attorneys and the FBI are sick and tired and are now aggressively moving to put a stop to it. Obviously, since the U.S. Supreme Court has thrown out the major tool that the feds were using, it will be up to the politicians themselves to pass new laws policing themselves. Is there anyone out there who believes that the very politicians who are most at risk are going to be willing to do that? If you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I’d love to sell you.

By the time you add up what the legislators are making in their various “part time” jobs, it comes pretty close to a hundred grand a year, and even more with all of the perquisites. There are many New Yorkers who would be happy to work for that salary. Legislators defend their outside activity by saying that their legislative jobs are “part time.” Some of them will tell you that while they spend relatively little time in Albany, they are busy in their part-time offices. Such business has grown and grown. Each member has a staff that has to be paid big bucks and cumulatively we’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars. At a time when we are about to start firing teachers and police officers in order to help balance the state budget, it seems obscene to keep providing the infamous member items to legislators.

Lobbyists figure prominently into this equation. Some of them have a long history of steering money to the campaigns of individual legislators. These lobbyists used to work for powerful legislators and it is well known that they are the “go to” people if you want to get through to legislator X. Of course, none of this is criminal behavior under the old rules. But lots of things, including the old rules, are changing. Federal prosecutors are starting to look at lobbyists and their close relationships with legislators. Joe Bruno may escape but he is really the first casualty of this new aggressive approach designed to bring Albany back into some kind of rational balance. No matter what happens, Bruno lost his job as the head Republican in the Legislature and that’s no small thing for the man. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: These people do not want to go to jail and if they have a brain in their heads they’ll get out in front of the curve and clean up their act. Now’s the time. It will be too late if they wait. 

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Alan S. Chartock is president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and an executive publisher at The Legislative Gazette.