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The question on everyone’s lips concerns the relationship between Eliot Spitzer and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver. Will the two men get along? Will the reformer and the legislative leader be able to work together?
Since I know and respect both men, I can only hope that what I am about to say here is accurate.
First, it is important to remember that they have two separate constituencies.
The governor reports to a statewide constituency. If Spitzer becomes governor, and I expect that he will, he will immediately be thought of as a presidential candidate. Everyone will be looking at him.
You do not have to be Einstein’s first wife (the smart one) to understand that Spitzer is going to do to New York state government what he did to Wall Street. He is going to reform the monster and make it accountable to the people. Trust me, we are looking at a single-minded man who knows what his mandate is going to be.
He’ll take this insiders’ lobby-laden, pay-to-play, three-men-in-a-room game and transform it into a functioning, transparent operation where people know where their money is going and how it is being spent. Spitzer will be talking to all members of the legislature, not just the two top guys. He will scrutinize state contracts, and there will be no sweetheart deals.
Spitzer knows that if he can accomplish that great task, history will record him as the best governor New York has ever had. He’ll become not only the governor of New York but the sheriff of Albany. He will come out guns blazing and if anyone gets in the way, there will be hell to pay.
Sheldon Silver, on the other hand, reports to his conference (caucus). The Democratic members of the Assembly are the ones who keep him in power. They have been playing the game the old fashioned way for years. It was that way when they arrived on the scene and they expect Shelly to keep on doing things the same way.
Trust me on this: Sheldon Silver rewarded his friends and punished most of his enemies. He has never forgotten what happened. Silver has to raise a lot of money to get more Democrats elected and to protect the ones at risk.
Everyone knows that if you want to influence politics in Albany you pay to play. If you are a big time lobbyist, you strategically get money to the Democrats to help elect their people. If you want something big, you get money to Silver on the Democratic side and to Joe Bruno on the Republican side and, up to now, to Pataki and his cronies.
That’s the way it has always been. You might call it “strategic investment.”
So now there is a golden opportunity. Bruno and his band of Republican state senators are close to majority party extinction. Silver is on notice that the game is going to change big time. Candidate Spitzer’s position is that he is “looking forward to working with Assemblyman Silver” on matters of reform.
It couldn’t get any clearer than that. Spitzer wants everyone to know the people’s business. He says that anyone who wants anything from the executive branch will have to approach in a way that is open to public inspection. Spitzer will certainly want the legislature to play the same game.
When Mario Cuomo tried to introduce ethics reform to both the executive branch and the legislative branch, he was thwarted. If you look at the shenanigans of the compromised Pataki people, you know that ethics reform is an issue whose time has come. The people are angry and everyone knows it. They want and demand change. Albany is a laughing stock.
The bottom line is that Shelly Silver is a smart man. The members of his Democratic conference are smart people. (Well, most of them, anyway.) They should be smart enough to know that the winds of change are blowing and they had better get out of the way. If there is one thing Eliot Spitzer’s opponents have found out it’s that to fool with this guy will get you into a whole lot of trouble. Shelly Silver and Joe Bruno are good guys. They both know when they are facing the inevitable. Shelly wants to stay speaker and this is the way to do it. I hear that Shelly and Spitzer are getting along famously. I’m betting on them both to do the right thing.