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Even with New Players, Same Game

Look at it one way, and Sheldon Silver is going to have more suitors come January. Instead of being the only Democrat in power, he will have an ally in the likely new governor, Eliot Spitzer, and the bills and policies he supports will be more likely to become law. Look at it another way, and Sheldon Silver is going to be a lot lonelier. Until now, his have been the only Democratic ears of the statewide decision-makers, and those looking for Democratic support have had nowhere to go but him. With Spitzer headed to the governor’s mansion, lobbyists and influence peddlers will not be spending nearly as much time with Silver. The lobbying community is unlikely to take either view. “You have to reach all pieces, you have to have your issues advocated by all components,” explained one prominent lobbyist. As the one man apparently certain to remain constant between this year and next, Silver will still have just as many knocks on his door. Kenneth Shapiro has watched this process evolve with various state leaders for decades, both as an aide to three speakers and more recently, as a lobbyist. He agreed that Silver has no reason to fear solitude. “What difference does it make at that stage of the game? What difference does it make whether you’re dealing with three Democrats, three Republicans, two and one?” Shapiro said. “Shelly Silver will still have the same amount of power, or whatever you want to call it, as he did before.”

— Edward-Isaac Dovere

Shelly Silver, On the Couch (continued)

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Because if he does, Miller said, “that could be grounds for divorce.”

Silver is characteristically quiet and cautious on this topic. He was the author of a public campaign finance law which passed the Assembly in 1985, and says he is still committed to seeing that passed. He talks of wanting ethics reform and to rework funding for public authorities, which have been blamed for much of the state government’s fiscal roller coaster and general dysfunction, as well as to consider a non-partisan redistricting.

“The seeds are there for changes, the seeds are there for reform, and now we’ll have a governor who can champion those reforms,” Silver said about these big ticket items.

Not on the menu for Silver are more technical, institutional changes, like ceding control to committee chairs to hire all the members of committee staffs or to give more rights to the Republican minority in the Assembly, which is traditionally embargoed as much as the Democrats are in the State Senate.

“Those are inside baseball,” he said. “That’s not what the world is crying out for.”

In Silver’s view, this is simply a matter of practicality: people get elected to lead branches of the state government, and “in any system, there are winners and losers by those decisions.” Changing how the Assembly’s winners shape life for its losers is “not what reform of state government is all about.”

“Powerful” is a word commonly associated with the speaker. “Reformer” is not.

Moreover, most Democratic members do not seem to actually want the changes. Those who might would have to cross Silver, a move likely to have strong consequences.

Between his 2001 run for public advocate and his 2005 run for Manhattan borough president, then-Assembly Member Scott Stringer (D) pushed a series of reforms which eliminated proxy voting. Had he not been angling to get out of Albany, he might have been more wary of risking exile into the political and structural wilderness. For members planning to stick around in Albany, this is not a place any of them want to be.

Stringer declined comment on either what the reform process was like or what he left Albany still wishing he had gotten done.

To Seymour Lachman, the former Democratic state senator from Brooklyn, Silver’s claimed commitment to reform is “disingenuous.”

Lachman is the author of the recent “Three Men in a Room,” which rips into Albany as a hotbed of dysfunction and leaders hoarding power.

“There are three men in a room who make the decisions for their conference, and whether the conference members agree or disagree—and many of them agree—they could lose their committee chairs, they could lose their member items and other perks if they took a stand in opposition,” he said.

He believes Albany leaders have so thoroughly corroded the democratic process that only a constitutional convention could fix things.

Maybe, though, Silver will prove to be the great reformer he says he has been trying to be his whole career. Unlikely, most believe, but maybe.

Not that this would be enough, explained longtime Assembly Member Alexander “Pete” Grannis (D-Manhattan).

“Shelly can be Eliot Spitzer’s best friend, but at the end of the day, if that means he pisses off members and members feel that he’s not looking out for their interests—he had a scare once before with Mike Bragman,” Grannis said, remembering the 2000 coup attempt.

So it would be a mistake for Spitzer to focus only on Silver in driving Assembly reform, Grannis said.

“It’s going to be a rude awakening,” Grannis said, imagining the conference reaction. “He’s not going to be able to dictate to us the way he’s able to dictate to the hundreds of lawyers in the attorney general’s office.”

In other words, Grannis predicted, expect more tension than change. But do not expect Silver to suddenly come out a loser.

“I don’t think it’s going to be peaches and cream, given what Spitzer is setting out to do,” Grannis said. “But I don’t think it’s going to undermine Shelly’s leadership within the Assembly.”

Pick a scenario. Imagine any hypothetical. Silver is in all of them.

Masters, Strokes

Silver may be the consummate backroom politician, but he has never wanted nor sought the bully pulpit, and generally avoids the cameras and microphones. He cannot be found on talk shows, and almost every sentence of his which appears in print sounds like it was grabbed as he rushed out the door. Many were.

“In most instances, I go back to the Democratic conference and talk about where I think the consensus is, so that by the time we go out to the news media, it’s an old story,” he said. “And that’s fine.”

He still tends to the needs of his 105,000 constituents in a downtown Manhattan district which has gotten endlessly more complicated since Sept. 11, 2001. With only token opposition as he seeks his 16th term in November, he seems likely to continue doing that, while his colleagues prepare to elect him to his sixth full term as speaker. Other than that City Council seat of long ago, these are the only political jobs he has ever wanted, and the only ones he has ever sought.

“I think the job I have now is the best job,” Silver explained. While it gives him enormous power, “it hovers on the line of retaining my individuality and who I am, as opposed to someone like the governor of the state—you become a 24 hour a day, seven day a week public person, and I relish having my own life.”

Having Spitzer as governor will make a difference, he believes, though neither is fully prepared for this new Albany realignment. Silver’s 12 years under Pataki are not likely to be instructive, nor will his 10 months under Cuomo.

Cuomo, Silver recalls, was “a governor set in his ways, 11 years into the job, totally different than it is now in that regard, with Eliot Spitzer, a governor coming in with someone who’s been the speaker for 13 years, who has developed both policies, relationships and a method by which the Democratic rank and file in the Assembly formulate the policies across the state.”

In Silver’s telling, Spitzer will benefit from being able to call on the Assembly Democrats’ experiences and orphaned legislation. Silver, meanwhile, will be able to push legislation he believes in from his new partner and pupil’s likely mandate-sized victory.

Here is the story everyone would like you to believe: Silver is eager and happy. Spitzer is eager and happy. State Democrats are eager and happy. They will lock arms, fix Albany, and skip toward the legislative sunset.

For Silver, it does not matter if this is true. He has a firm grip on his job, and by virtue of that, a firm grip on Democratic politics throughout the state: he controls committee assignments, budgets and member items for his conference, and he controls the many county chairs among his conference. When Spitzer does eventually spar with Silver, the speaker may not be the one to come out bloodied.

With the new governor getting the attention, Silver will leave the public scrutiny to a man who seems to enjoy it more, and retreat even deeper behind the scenes. He says he will focus on resolving the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit and the looming Medicare crisis. Few believe that Albany’s master over collecting and spending chits will celebrate his new freedom from the spotlight by relegating himself to just that.

Probably, he will be able to do that without appearing so regularly in editorials and good government reports. Spitzer will be the new target, Silver said, and “it’s time they throw darts at somebody else.”