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Eliot Spitzer is running for governor largely on his record over two terms as attorney general.
As to which aspects of that record most need to be continued, and who is the most qualified to take up the mantle, the three Democrats looking to succeed Spitzer have different opinions. And each is scrambling to elbow his vision to the front.
Spitzer’s relentlessness is mentioned often. He gained a national reputation for his pursuit of white collar crime and other fraud on Wall Street, and his successors now look to focus with that same sort of intensity on other areas.
Mark Green, the former public advocate, says healthcare should be the top priority for the next attorney general. Though he talks about keeping an eye on Wall Street, creating a special unit of the civil rights bureau for disability rights and fighting predatory lending, he says zeroing in on healthcare reform would address the most pressing issue for New Yorkers.
This would mean addressing Medicaid fraud and an effort “to make HMOs stop systemically cheating patients who pay their premiums by drive-by diagnoses, by bundling, down-coding and shorting hospitals,” he said.
He has proposed creating a Martin Act for healthcare, referring to the state securities regulation passed in 1921 which Spitzer wielded to prosecute many crimes on Wall Street.
Referring to his record as consumer affairs commissioner and public advocate, Green spoke of taking “so many actions involving hospitals and drug companies, pharmaceutical benefits managers and HMOs, and it’s an indication of the areas I’d like to focus on.”
He added, “it’s 15 percent of the economy, a hundred thousand Americans die each year from mistakes in hospitals—it’s pricing us out of the market for cars and other products.”
Green’s goals cannot be accomplished without purging the state government of the influence of money and special interests, said Sean Maloney, a White House staff secretary under President Bill Clinton.
He sees reform as an end in itself, as well as a means to “kill the snakes in the nursery,” his term for his plans to “protect the innocent and the vulnerable, protect kids online, reduce violence against women [and] protect seniors in nursing homes.”
He used the reaction to the Queens blackout earlier this summer as an example of the connection.
“If you want to know why the Public Service Commission is asleep at the switch, why this watchdog has become a lapdog, the answer is that the commissioners are all political cronies of the governor, and they are not going to take on Con Ed,” he said.
He would also use technology for background checks for all teachers and health aides, and require social networking services like MySpace to create codes of conduct which validate the identities of users.
Maloney would also use the position to “fight back” against the current presidential administration. He has pledged to file a suit claiming that the national wiretapping program was unconstitutional.
Fighting back against the federal government is also a theme of former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Andrew Cuomo.
“The federal government is failing New Yorkers,” he argued, speaking of “protecting New Yorkers where the federal government has failed—Wall Street, environment, healthcare, guns.”
Expressing interest as well in “racial, social and economic justice,” he also sounded the need for reform in state government.
“If you expose what Albany is really doing, the people of the state will not tolerate it,” he said.
While not discussing any specific plans or policies, he said that if elected, his follow-up to Spitzer would be to make himself known as a “crusader for social justice, government reformer antidote to Bush’s negative policies to New Yorkers.”
As for Spitzer, though glowing reviews of him are part of the campaign rhetoric of all four candidates—and even of their prospective Republican opponent, former Westchester County District Attorney Jeanine Pirro—he has stayed quiet. He has not endorsed any candidate in the race.