Stalking Horse on the Loose?

The overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic in the ballot box wouldn't have been possible had not the fractious Serbian opposition leadership momentarily put aside its divisions and conflicting ambitions and unite behind one strong candidate.

Closer to home and eight years later, the speaker of the Assembly, Sheldon Silver, is confronting a democratic upheaval in his Lower Manhattan district, where he has wielded power with token opposition since the beginning of the Carter administration.

The talk around Albany is that the 64-year-old speaker is vulnerable. His Grand Street base is fading, replaced by a wealthier and more independent voting bloc that is less tolerant of his intrigues against the public interest, his obeisance to trial lawyers and public labor unions, and the staleness of his vision.

To a large degree, Mr. Silver's staying power rests on the millions of dollars of pork he delivers to constituents every year, but the kingdom is coming under threat from a popular revulsion against the most famous symbol of Albany blight.

Now, for the first time in two decades, Mr. Silver is running opposed. But whereas the Serbian opposition had the self-possession to rally around the candidate most capable of defeating Milosevic, the grassroots effort to topple the speaker has been unable to restrain itself with the same discipline.

Mr. Silver, who would prefer not to deal with the tiresome business of a primary, has the good fortune to be running against two opponents, a neighborhood activist, Paul Newell, and a corporate contract lawyer, Luke Henry, whose dueling campaigns are exactly what the Albany veteran needs to split the opposition vote and allow his aging base to lift him to yet another two-year term.

The self-destructive strategy naturally has given rise to suspicions among quite a few of Mr. Silver's critics that one of the candidates — to be specific, Mr. Henry — is a stalking horse for the speaker, a view that rests somewhere between conspiracy theory and a reasonable hunch.

Fueling the theory is the puzzling nature of Mr. Henry's bid, which got started last fall around the same time that Mr. Newell launched his own campaign.

A native of Westchester who moved into the district a couple of years ago, Mr. Henry is a 33-year-old newlywed with his first child on the way. As New York magazine noted, after graduating from Fordham University School of Law in 2002, he's worked for five law firms, most recently at Willkie Farr & Gallagher, which he left in March.

He worked for Geraldine Ferraro's 1998 Senate campaign (and a year later moved into an apartment owned by her husband, John Zaccaro) and says he volunteered for state senator Liz Krueger's 2000 campaign (She says she doesn't remember meeting him then.), and the 2004 presidential campaign of Howard Dean (Mr. Henry can't recall offhand what his responsibilities were.).

He refuses to talk about his parents or his upbringing. He doesn't recall exactly when he made up his mind to run for office. The decision, he said, was made gradually, stirred by a feeling that somebody should challenge Mr. Silver, but he can't point to any moment of decision.

His supporters are another touchy subject. When pressed, he obliges with two names: Nelson Denis, a former assemblyman from East Harlem, and Norma Ramirez, a former district leader of the Lower East Side. He's not much more forthcoming about his political heroes, among whom he identifies two, FDR and Mario Cuomo, and leaves it at that.

A year and a half ago, he became involved with the Village Reform Democratic Club, whose leadership rebuffed him last month by endorsing Mr. Silver in a vote in which he placed a distant third place next to Mr. Newell. Mr. Henry isn't urging Mr. Newell to drop out and says he doesn't see why running against two candidates puts him at a disadvantage.

Asked why he's challenging Mr. Silver, Mr. Henry replied by e-mailing a less than inspiring statement:

"Downtown needs someone who will fight to protect housing, stand up for the environment on issues like congestion pricing, make good schools and jobs for all of our kids a priority, and work to tackle big problems with big ideas. That's not what we have, and that's what I offer. Albany's dysfunction impedes progress on these and other critical issues. The Speaker is complicit in the dysfunction and does not recognize that the status quo hurts us all," he wrote.

"He could be a spoiler," a longtime resident of the East Village and anti-gentrification activist, Rob Hollander, said. "It's just a total puzzle as to why someone who is so green about the issues would think it's a good thing for him to be doing."

Said another neighborhood activist, Quinn Raymond: "The reason people like me are suspicious is because he has been unable to give even a three-sentence explanation as to how he can win in a three-way or even in a two-way race."

Mr. Henry says he's not a secret spoiler. And he's puzzled as to why people aren't questioning the motives of Mr. Newell, a 33-year-old native of Lower Manhattan, a Stuyvesant High School dropout, a former Yiddish archivist at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and an AIDS awareness organizer who people tell me has become an impressive expert on contextual zoning.

Suspicions about Mr. Henry's motives may be paranoia. But clearly, Mr. Silver is taking this race seriously. He's marshalling the resources of the Working Families Party and, according to a source, has asked a legislative aide to conduct opposition research on Mr. Newell, but not on Mr. Henry. On Friday, his legislative office blanketed the East Village with fliers in three languages (English, Spanish, and Chinese) encouraging constituents to visit Mr. Silver's mobile district office and have their complaints heard.

Mr. Silver, of course, is no tyrant but an elected official who happens to play the political game better than anyone else. The question is just how good is he?

jacob@nysun.com

Correction from June 18, 2008: No legislative staff member is paid to conduct opposition research for Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver's campaign. Mr. Silver's mobile district office has been in existence for a decade, and notifications about its presence were issued by his district office. A column on page 9 of the June 16 New York Sun was incorrect.