Silver’s Not Buying The Act
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
When Governor Paterson yelled, “Fire!” last week, Albany’s most cautious politician, Sheldon Silver, had the nerve to ask, “Where?”
The governor had breaking news. The deficit, he said, had jumped by more than $1 billion and lawmakers needed to do something about it. Now. The speaker remained composed. “Let’s sit around for a few more weeks and analyze a little more data before we act precipitously,” he reportedly said in a radio interview.
The Daily News’s editorial board accused Mr. Silver of fiddling while Albany burns. Before chastising the speaker, let’s look at things from Mr. Silver’s perspective for a change.
Mr. Paterson signs a budget agreement in April, hailing it as a model of prudence, and then turns around and proclaims the sky to be falling. It was a clever move on the part of Mr. Paterson. He gets to bask in a defining leadership moment by declaring a crisis for which he denies any blame, while shoving responsibility for solving it to the Legislature. That way, he can take credit for rescuing the state from fiscal ruin if lawmakers plug the budget hole or use them as a scapegoat if they let the problem fester.
Mr. Silver isn’t playing along. From his point of view, it’s not his job to orchestrate Mr. Paterson’s executive debut. While crises are inherently good for governors, giving them relevance they otherwise lack, they are bad for lawmakers, who are marginalized by a sped-up process and more susceptible to a voter backlash.
Behind Mr. Silver’s reluctance lie other factors. If the speaker seems unfazed, it’s also because he knows there’s not much bite to Mr. Paterson’s bark.
The governor rose to power not by making enemies but by making friends. That is why he surprised many by having the gall to suggest in last week’s fireside chat that lawmakers were away on vacation. Sure enough, one day later, he apologized for his impudence. “I am not going to have an acrimonious relationship with the Legislature,” Mr. Paterson said.
Mr. Silver also understands that Mr. Paterson is only playing the role of fiscal disciplinarian, and he is prepared to call the governor’s bluff. The governor is like a smoker who quits for a day and excoriates other smokers for their nasty habit.
Mr. Paterson refuses to talk about fiscal restraint other than in the vaporous abstract. “The era of buy now, pay later and later is over,” he told New Yorkers in his televised speech, doing his best impression of Hugh Carey.
The governor spent 21 years as a senator in the Legislature, but still cannot come up with a single area of inefficiency or waste in the entire realm of the $120 billion state government bureaucracy.
Asked specifically on Thursday what he thinks could be pruned from the budget, he said: “We are going to have to look at prized programs in some of our most esoteric areas to cut or our state will move to the brink of bankruptcy.” Whatever that means.
The Paterson administration is now patting itself on the back for its boldness. Boldness would be to question whether New York is able to afford another 10% hike in education spending, or to suggest that lawmakers lower public employee pension costs so that they are more in line with national averages, or to propose new Medicaid policies that encourage cost control. That would really get Mr. Silver’s attention.
There’s a precedent for this rhetoric gap. Four years ago, then the leader of the Senate Democrats, Mr. Paterson drafted an “alternative budget” proposal from the one submitted by Governor Pataki. “The answer is not always additional spending,” it stated in bold letters.
Yet, that’s exactly what Mr. Paterson prescribed: more than $1 billion in restorations to health care, public education, and social services. To pay for it all, he called on Mr. Pataki to collect it from the rich and businesses by increasing taxes on wealthy residents (just as what Mr. Silver now recommends) and eliminating “corporate loopholes.”
If Mr. Paterson wants Mr. Silver to take him seriously and for the Legislature “to cut up our credit cards,” he could begin by setting an example in his own shop.
When your executive staff is larger than the combined staffs of the governor’s office and lieutenant governor’s office under Eliot Spitzer, when your 28-year-old press aide earns more than the chief judge of New York, and when your chief of staff is allowed to use three state police officers as chauffeurs as the Post reported, you squander credibility and encourage cynicism.
That’s why when the governor says jump, Mr. Silver takes a seat, reclines, and watches the performance begin.
jacob@nysun.com