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Protecting the Home Front

Sheldon Silver has often used his power to protect his downtown Manhattan district, where he was born and raised, where his parents and his grandparents lived, where one of his sons and grandchildren live now.

“I made a commitment when I was first elected that I wasn’t buying real estate in Albany, that I wasn’t getting an apartment in Albany, that the message was going to be very clear: I worked in Albany to represent the people of downtown New York,” Silver said. “I’ve experienced everything that my constituents who I represent experienced in the district.”

This has been especially important since the terrorist attacks of five years ago, which have elevated affairs in his district to national prominence.

“You start over on Sept. 11, 2001,” Silver said. “It’s a whole new challenge. The whole area’s been affected. Whether you’re east or west, the economy’s been affected. Clearly the health of residents has been affected. The rebuilding process affects everybody.”

He has lambasted Gov. George Pataki for a rebuilding effort which he says is too slow and mismanaged, proposing what he calls his own “Marshall Plan” to renew downtown.

“It’s invigorating,” he said.

Silver cites the area’s major economic importance to the city and state as the rationale for his protective moves. But it is the benefit to his constituents and the area that he has always called home which have driven him to use the power he wields in the Assembly to kill the West Side Stadium, saying the construction would endanger progress at Ground Zero, and advance the Second Avenue Subway, which would eventually terminate in his district.

“You can take me out of downtown, but you can’t take downtown out of me,” he said, reflecting on how his background affects his approach to the job. “It’s a new beginning of the last five years and I hope that it comes to fruition.”

— Edward-Isaac Dovere

Shelly Silver, On the Couch (continued)

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“Sometimes the only weapon you have is the ability to withhold support for something until you receive due consideration of what you think is important,” he explained. The press painted a constant portrait of him as a shadowy obstructionist, the living embodiment of entrenched political interests. For those in the general public who knew him at all, he became the archetype of a power-mongering, do-nothing politician.

He has been likened to the devil. And sometimes worse.

Many of his members, who tend to celebrate his steadfastness in the face of Pataki, defend him.

“I certainly don’t think he’s the demon he’s made out to be. I certainly don’t perceive him to be so autocratic that individual members don’t have influence. And I certainly don’t think it would be substantially different if you replaced him with somebody else,” said Assembly Member Daniel O’Donnell (D-Manhattan). O’Donnell has spent the last four years as one of his conference’s more liberal and more dissenting voices.

For leaders like Silver, opinions depend on where one stands in relation to them.

“It’s either forceful or bullying—it depends which side you’re on,” O’Donnell explained. “If you agree with them, they’re forceful. If you’re opposed to them, they’re bullying.”

Silver does not seem to care much about that, either.

“Labels really don’t mean anything. It’s what you can show you succeeded in,” he explained. “I believe we succeeded.”

Silver’s victories, however, have not come from leading the dance. They have come from stepping on Pataki’s feet or simply shutting down the band altogether.

He speaks proudly of extracting concessions which eliminated the city’s sales tax on clothing and secured more than a billion dollars for school construction in last year’s budget. But more than anything, his role has been stopping or slowing a Pataki agenda which Silver says has been out of step with the desires and interests of a majority of New Yorkers, especially those in the city.

“Ironically, the state constitution gives the governor the veto power, but it was Shelly that exercised that power more than the governor did,” explained political consultant Norman Adler, who called Silver “one of the most consummate negotiators that I have ever seen in all the years in the business.”

The process occasionally led him into controversial territory, as when he supported Pataki’s wage increase for healthcare workers in advance of the 2002 election. The move helped win Pataki the endorsement of 1199/SEIU in his reelection effort, angering some Democrats who said he had sold out the chances of Carl McCall, then running against Pataki as the party nominee.

Moves like this, and those which benefited trial lawyers (he remains of counsel with a personal injury firm) have earned him criticism. He has been attacked for stacking committees to prevent or promote certain legislation, and for not fully disclosing his plans to all his members. Complaints that the state government is run by three men in a room—the governor, the State Senate majority leader and the Assembly speaker—have gotten louder during Silver’s tenure, and ballooning pork barrel spending has people saying that he has presided over an ever-deeper dip into dysfunction.

Among the critics of what has happened is David Paterson (D-Manhattan), the outgoing State Senate minority leader and Spitzer’s lieutenant governor running mate.

“We have negotiated away our souls,” he said. “We have been loyal, and now we’re compromising everything to the leaders, and we’re drowning in an orgy of compromise.”

But as Silver sees it, he has stayed true to his prime duty, advancing the interests of his members. He is satisfied with his efforts, and believes New Yorkers are as well.

The proof, he said, is in the election results. In 1998, Chuck Schumer won his Senate seat and Spitzer became attorney general. Hillary Rodham Clinton held the lines in 2000, as did Alan Hevesi in the comptroller’s race two years later. Pataki won reelection twice, handily. But he and his lieutenant governor are the only statewide Republicans left.

And in what Silver seems to think is the most telling success, he has added 11 seats to his majority in the last 10 years. With 105 out of 150 members, he has had the power to override Pataki vetoes, only strengthening his hand. If the criticism he has faced reflected political reality, Silver said, this would not be true. “Obviously we must be doing something right,” Silver reasons. “They get reelected.”

At this point, Silver has passed the point where expanding his majority would practically affect how he leads the chamber. Perhaps more importantly, his party seems poised to control all six statewide offices for the first time since 1938. Silver is about to go from lone voice in the forest to being flush with friends.

“He has not yet received anywhere near the credit he deserves for stepping in when the party was on life support systems and pulling the party back from bankruptcy and total collapse,” argued Hope, the former state chair.

At 62, his six and a half terms as speaker put him just over halfway to the record for longest-serving speaker, a distinction some intimates say he is determined to earn for himself. Silver crushed a 2000 coup attempt by then-Majority Leader Michael Bragman, responding both by stripping Bragman of just about every right of his office and by beginning what some members say is an ongoing effort to engage the members of his conference more actively.

Just as he learned how to negotiate with Pataki, he has learned how to negotiate with his members. Now, especially given how early he backed Spitzer in the gubernatorial race, no one expects that a challenger would even dare to arise.

So the question is how Silver fits into the new Albany puzzle.

Or how that Albany puzzle fits around him.

Will You Love Me in January As You Did in May?

As Albany’s future has begun to congeal around the continuing Silver reign and the presumed Spitzer win, reports and whispers have been circulating about Silver jealously guarding the throne. Giving up his policy and political perch as the state’s top Democrat after 12 years will not be easy, they say, and certainly not something Silver is willing to do.

“It’s an easy story to write,” said Kenneth Shapiro, who served in various roles for three of Silver’s predecessors before becoming a prominent Albany lobbyist. But as he and others who know Silver point out, it just does not seem to be true.

“Both are practical men, both understand they’re going to have to work with each other to get a common Democratic position,” Shapiro said. “It’s not going to be easy at first, but ultimately I believe they will succeed.”

Albany observers describe the men as kindred spirits: both stubborn, intelligent, committed Democrats. They will fight sometimes, sure. But at the end of the day, goes the story, each is going to see in the other a man with common goals, and each is going to use that man to get what he wants out of the process.

“I think what you’re going to find is we will work well together as partners in compromising the various views on the issues. Labels are less important. Practicalities are more important,” Silver said.

Those outside the circle are hardly convinced by this heartwarming story of mutual political manipulation. But those who have watched the evolution of the relationship between the two agree that, whether out of political expediency or harmony of political ideals, the first few years will be a honeymoon.

Mel Miller, the former speaker who served in the Assembly when both Cuomo and Hugh Carey before him first arrived as governor, foresees what he called a “pretty predictable pattern” in governor-speaker relations.

“Initially, for the first two years, the governor becomes the dominant party. As time goes on and with the legislature as an institution, I think you’ll find that the legislature becomes somewhat more competitive,” he said.

In the early months and years, in the two or three initial budgets the likely new governor negotiates, Miller expects Silver to rally the ranks behind Spitzer’s agenda, even if that means agreeing to slaughter a few sacred cows.

That is, so long as Spitzer adheres to a simple rule: do not try to change the way Assembly does business.

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