Jeff Klein, Senate president?

It almost happened, right after the coup threw everything into a food processor and hit puree. Klein floated the idea of a power-sharing agreement, with himself as president pro tem and Dean Skelos as majority leader.

But he lacked the votes or enough of the power players behind him to make it a reality.

Instead, Pedro Espada and John Sampson got the bigger offices, the fancy titles. Malcolm Smith got a graceful exit. And Klein was still deputy majority leader, the only one still in the same position post-coup as he was pre-coup.

Post-partisan Albany was not to be.

“Power-sharing,” groused Sen. Carl Kruger, “is another term for bullshit.”

Klein has raised millions in campaign cash, passed dozens of bills into law and has a talent for finding and cultivating new talent to run in contested elections. His supporters often portray him as a loyal soldier who unselfishly accepts more than his fair share of the burden, a loyal number two guy who actually runs the conference, beyond the view of the cameras. To them, he is the Atlas of Albany, shouldering the weight of a broken political system.  

To his detractors, Klein is arrogant and divisive, a man whose skills as a fundraiser will grow less valuable as the majority becomes stronger and more self-sufficient, less the embodiment of how things should be than of how things might have been, but now certainly are not.

As for Klein: he is embarrassed, frustrated, annoyed, angry. He donated funds from his personal war chest to the campaigns of embattled colleagues, he knocked on doors in Buffalo and Oswego for candidates looking to flip Republican seats. He takes significant credit for helping engineer the move to the majority last year, and fumes at how his colleagues have fumbled the opportunity handed to them by voters. All this on top of perceived personal slights, legislative priorities being watered down or dismissed out of hand.

“Quite frankly, all of these people shouldn’t be in the majority,” he said bluntly. “I’d hate to have to be the judge, but they should really be in the minority. Because they’re really not ready to lead, they don’t understand how the legislative process works, that no matter who you are—majority leader, deputy majority leader—you have job to do. Go do it!”

Klein’s allies wonder how much more he can take.

“You get funded by Jeff Klein and then Jeff Klein comes out with an income tax proposal and you say no,” one sympathetic Democratic senator said. “You basically bit the hand that fed you.” 

But now that everything in Albany is officially upended again, with President Obama pressuring Gov. David Paterson to give up his plans for re-election and Attorney General Andrew Cuomo moving one giant step closer to the executive mansion, a clear exit strategy has emerged. This late in the game in the run-up to next November, an open race for attorney general would likely favor the most skilled and best-connected fundraiser. This late in the game, someone who could tout his experience in investigations and consumer protection would have an advantage. This late in the game, frontrunners will not come easily, but a man like Klein could be in a very good position. 

Klein came close to running for attorney general in 2006, raising $2.6 million and even going on a 34-county listening tour. Ultimately he backed down, with Cuomo’s presence leaving little oxygen or votes for anyone else.  

He had been in the Senate for all of two years before he thought of leaving the first time. Now that he has been there for six, Klein finds himself at the precipice. When Paterson officially announces he is out—and the question at this point seems only a matter of when—and Cuomo makes official what is probably the worst kept secret in politics, Klein will be faced with a choice. Run for attorney general and risk being impaled by all the forces that might align against him to keep him from the top job, or stay in a legislative body that continues to find new ways to define humiliation.

When asked about his plans for 2010, Klein sticks to the party line: do the people’s work, expand the majority, change the state for the better.

But the party line is clearly getting exhausting.

Driving through his district on a recent August afternoon, Klein begins to wrap up a friendly chat with Adolfo Cárrion, the former Bronx borough president and current Obama urban policy czar.

But wait, Cárrion says. He wants to know the latest from Albany. He has been out of the loop, in Washington for past six months attempting to build a new office from the ground up. He is eager for some post-coup gossip.

With his iPhone cradled in his shoulder, press clippings and fundraising notes in his lap, Klein grits his teeth.

“It’s like watching a public execution,” he reports.


Earlier, over lunch at his favorite Italian restaurant in the Bronx neighborhood where he was born and raised, Klein sounds like someone on the verge of making his choice.

He recalled a recent conversation with Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman urging him to push the Senate in a positive direction after the coup was settled.

“Many of us can’t grasp that,” the deputy majority leader complained, forking a piece of tomato with mozzarella. “They continue to act out, and it drives me crazy.”

Frustration has taken its toll. Widely known as a low-key, deliberative type, respected by most of his colleagues, adored by many his constituents, even lauded by some in the press—among them, grizzled Daily News columnist Bob Kappstatter, who has called Klein “a good boychick”—he rages against his fellow Democrats as if he were scolding a class of naughty fourth graders.

Some Democrats do not take the time to read their own bills, Klein complains. Then they take offense when someone tries debating their bills on the floor. And others are so out of touch that they think anyone who owns a home must be as rich as Michael Bloomberg.

Klein’s temper has gotten him in trouble before. There was the story last year of a heated traffic confrontation in Lower Manhattan, when Klein allegedly physically threatened a bicyclist after almost hitting him. Then there was the infamous near-fist fight between Klein and Espada over the summer, when the two nearly came to blows during a tense closed-door meeting.

Klein says he does not understand what drives Espada or his insistence that the party-hopping was motivated purely by reform and Latino pride.

“I don’t have a lot of patience for nonsense,” Klein said. “I find it very difficult to deal with Pedro Espada. I don’t know what he wants. I don’t know what his end game is.”

Espada is not the only one with whom Klein has butted heads. Several legislators remember him fighting openly with Smith on the Senate floor. Too many cooks in the kitchen, some Republicans tittered.

With Sampson as top chef, most expect Klein to remain frustrated as second in command. As bad as things have been for him, they predict things are about to get worse.

But Sampson said he wants to make the relationship work, if only because he might need to for the sake of his own success.

“I’m selfish,” he said. “I want to keep my friends close to me and I will try to persuade him to stay.”

That may not be enough for Klein, who is now saying that his colleagues are driven mainly by fear, more concerned with their own self-preservation than public service. Klein paints himself as the rare senator who wants to move legislation forward, but sees no end to slender majorities or Democratic skittishness to take big stands.

“People are so afraid to ask for votes. Fucking put it on the floor—come on! Stand up. Vote yes, vote no. I’m for gay marriage. You think gay marriage in popular in my district?” he says. “I’m not afraid.”

Even his most ardent supporters are convinced that Klein will never be made majority leader, saying he is too stubborn to play the political games that Albany demands.

“They’re a bunch of kids,” said one Democratic consultant. “Why would they put the headmaster in charge?”


Klein says he loves being a state legislator, but needs little prodding to begin the speculation game.

“The issues that I always talk about, putting more money into people’s pockets, certainly resonates with everyone,” he said. “Especially things that I’ve been involved in, consumer affairs, investigations—it does fit very nicely into attorney general.”

Klein says he already sees himself as a statewide figure, citing his efforts to win upstate seats for the Democrats as prime evidence. In those efforts, he has both succeeded (Darrel Aubertine) and failed (Joe Mesi), but in both cases he traveled to those communities, knocked on doors and connected with voters.

“He’s eminently qualified for higher office,” said Sen. Neil Breslin. “He’s probably more conservative than most of the senators in the city. But not that conservative. I think he has a broad appeal.”

The bigger problem, counter-intuitively, may be appealing to voters closer to home. Anyone hoping to win a statewide Democratic primary would need to run strong in New York City and surrounding suburbs, but though Klein’s district spans both the Bronx and Westchester, he would have to make serious in-roads with black and Latino voters and burnish his progressive credentials in order to fortify his grip on the city.

That he is most politically and ideologically aligned, not with his fellow city-based senators, but with those from Long Island and upstate, has not escaped the notice of his critics.

“He is not a rabid racist,” said one Democratic senator who has clashed with Klein in the past. “He is titular head of that faction that is all white.”

As Klein begins to think seriously about the field and his place within it, liberal-friendly rivals like State Sen. Eric Schneiderman are not his greatest concern. He has his eyes on Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi, who already has some statewide name recognition and is a prodigious fundraiser in his own right.

“There may be another 800 lb. gorilla, and I know Suozzi is that person,” Klein said.

Klein may also have some problems with the increasingly powerful and aggressive Working Families Party (WFP). The party rejected Klein’s bill to raise income taxes on high-earners because it included a middle class tax cut. And some of Klein’s supporters grumble that the WFP gets credit for a lot of the fundraising and politicking Klein does for other candidates.

But Klein could run without the WFP. He has the money, the ambition, the vision and the connections. And after Obama’s blitz on Paterson’s legitimacy, the race for attorney general appears wide open.

One potential candidate, former insurance superintendant Eric Dinallo, has already fired the opening salvo in the race. His “throw the bums out” line would look to hang the albatross of a dysfunctional Senate around Klein’s neck, hoping to capitalize on voters’ record low opinions of anyone associated with Albany.

Klein would have to establish his outsider credentials in a hurry.

He is an investigation buff. Over the last 15 years, he has lifted the veil on predatory lending, uncollected cigarette taxes, discriminatory HMOs and registered sex offenders. He has worked with the city to update the restaurant inspection system and has gone after so-called “chimney-sweep fraud.”

Most political observers will put an $8 million price tag on a campaign for attorney general. Among his Senate colleagues, Klein’s skills as a fundraiser are second only to those of Carl Kruger, the pugnacious head of the Amigo faction.

Klein is known for a “soft sell,” approach, avoiding an outright appeal for a contribution and instead building relationships that ultimately lead to millions in his war chest. He hits them up slowly and repeatedly, building a community of top-dollar contributors that he can return to over and over, especially if he needs to contribute just to him alone.

“So are most of your investments commercial? And you do work on private homes too?” he asked one donor over the phone recently, ending the call not by pleading for a donation, but by promising to fly out to Chicago to learn more about the man’s business.

This is the kind of diligent but delicate approach that seasoned candidates for higher office have perfected. For the sake of his own advancement in a shortened election cycle, it may prove very useful, and just at the moment when some of his colleagues are beginning to shrug off his importance as a fundraiser and mentor for new members, somehow newly confident in their own abilities and willing to hint that they believe Klein’s usefulness to the Senate Democrats may have passed.

“The majority as a political entity is better able, if somewhat dysfunctional, to fundraise as a majority,” said one Democratic senator. “I think [Klein] has been devalued politically in that sense.”


Apple-cinnamon scented candles burn in both Klein’s offices in the Bronx and Albany. A bottle of Listerine rests in the door compartment of his black town car. He is careful to keep his smoking quiet, just as he is careful to make sure his cuffs are always shot and his shoes are always shined. He is not obsessive compulsive, but he does seem have a thing about cleanliness.

With no wife, no kids and an elderly mother in Florida, Klein would only have to worry about the impact on his pet iguana, bearded dragon and tortoise if he does decide to jump in an attorney general race.

Unless the women at the Northeast Bronx Senior Center, a few short blocks from Klein’s district office get their way.

“Rosie, get away from him, he’s my boyfriend,” one elderly lady says, yanking Klein out of the grasp of a particularly amorous orange-haired woman.

Klein chuckles. He is used to this kind of amicable interaction with constituents. What this nice Jewish boy is not used to, though, is the kind of bare-knuckled, free-for-all a Democratic primary for attorney general would likely be.

For all that some fans might want to blow up the significance of his victory flipping what was once a Republican State Senate seat, Klein can be hesitant to get into a fight. After months of speculation, he did not challenge Malcolm Smith for majority leader last fall, and even when practically everyone in the Bronx took a side in the street fight for control of the county Democratic Party, Klein stayed neutral.

He says he could not turn his back on the former leader, José Rivera, even when Rivera had clearly lost the support of the majority of the county party. The answer was, as always, loyalty.

For all of that purported commitment, in an attorney general primary, Klein would find himself pitted against current and former colleagues, many of whom have stronger relationships with party leaders and other power brokers. Suozzi is closely aligned with incoming State Democratic Party chair Jay Jacobs. Schneiderman is allied with Paterson, Smith and the WFP. Westchester Assembly Member Richard Brodsky, another possible candidate, has a knack for stirring up trouble and getting his name in the papers. And Dinallo, for what it is worth, has his former boss, Eliot Spitzer.

For now, Klein says he is focused on building up the Senate Democrat’s campaign coffers by about $15 million for next year’s elections, when he predicts his conference could add up to four more Senate seats.

But still, there is a part of him that does not want to be there for what would come next. And suddenly, the loyal soldier, fated to be forever second in command, has, due to a crazy set of circumstances involving a prostitute, a Senate coup and an extremely interested president of the United States, found himself thrown a lifeline.

He could leave behind the last 10 months. He could leave behind Albany. He could leave behind a system that because of his politics, his personality, his race, his friendships, his colleagues and a host of other factors might otherwise leave him stuck in the background for life. 

Klein has made a similar play before. Twice he has made a play to lead the Democratic conference, and twice identity politics and the entrenched powers denied him.
Could this time, out among the voters, and not among his fellow senators, be different?

“Jeff is a political survivor,” said Sen. Tom Libous, the deputy minority leader and Klein’s counterpart as Senate floor leader. 

“He’s a very artful politician and certainly ends up at the top of the list,” Libous added, “but not the very top.”

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ABOVE: After another Albany shake-up, Jeff Klein begins to line up a shot at attorney general. Photos by Andrew Schwartz