Mon, 14 Apr 2008 16:42:00

Right after it happened, no one seemed to notice.

Eliot Spitzer announced his resignation at 11:44 a.m. on March 12. By 3:20 that afternoon, Aurelia Greene (D-Bronx), Assembly speaker pro tempore, was sitting in her spot in the speaker’s chair, her pencil hovering over a crossword puzzle, while a few determined Republicans went through the motions of arguing for their amendments to the budget resolution. Mark Weprin (D-Queens) was leaning back in his chair, the stem of the mini-American flag from his desk pressed against his teeth. Richard Brodsky (D-Westchester) stood in the back of the chamber, giving an interview.

The constitutionality of the first offered amendment came up for a vote. A few members leaned in to press the buttons on their desk immediately. A few more waited for the next break in their conversations. A few were so immersed in their newspapers or Blackberrys, their jokes or snacks, that they seemed not to notice anything going on around them.

A lot of the tally board stayed unlit.

Like an overworked high school teacher, Majority Leader Ron Canestrari (D-Albany/Rensselaer/Saratoga) rose to his microphone, begging his colleagues to pay attention.

“This is our first vote of the day,” he said. “Members who are in the chamber, please vote. Members who are not in the chamber, please join us. We have work to do.”

That was four hours after the governor announced he would step down. Four weeks after, they finished the budget he had laid out, although nine days past deadline and $10 billion higher than 2007’s. Wick’s Law reform, which Spitzer had pressed for, was part of the budget deal. Legislative pay raises, which Spitzer had initially resisted but had reportedly come to accept, were not. Perhaps the last chapter in one of the strangest stories in New York political history was closed.

Now people can begin trying to understand what it all meant and what, in the lives of New Yorkers and the hallways of Albany, it will continue to mean.

Day 1-Day 442: The Spitzer Legacy

Full coverage on NYCapitolNews.com...

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• Silda Wall Spitzer’s Effects and Michelle Paige Paterson’s Prospects
• Questions Swirl Over Which Firms Stand on Solid Ground
• In Alabama, a Lieutenant Governor who Became Governor, then Lieutenant Governor Again
• The Next Step for the Career Cut Short
• Once Governor, Always Governor
• Signs of Change
• Bond Issues

Year One was a disaster. Everyone admits that. Year Two started off better, and with a couple of overtures to legislators and Darrel Aubertine’s win for the North Country State Senate seat two weeks before Spitzer was revealed as Client 9, things were looking better. Where things might have gone, no one will ever know.

Spitzer was governor for just over 14 months—less time than the term of just about any elected official in the world. He won in 2006 with 65.7 percent of the vote, a massive response to a campaign built on many specific promises, but more than anything, on promise itself. After years of knowing and being told about the sorry state of the state, Spitzer made voters believe that he was going to do something. State government would change. Albany would change. The lives of New Yorkers would change. And right away, too, as his campaign slogan famously declared.

Day One started with an early morning jog and the signing of five executive orders. The first four dealt withreform, imposing restrictions on the relationship between lobbyists and government employees, preventing state employees from being in any way involved with his or the lieutenant governor’s campaigns, ordering state agencies to broadcast their meetings on the internet and establishing judicial screening panels. The fifth executive order renewed a slew of basic administrative actions from the Cuomo and Pataki administrations.

The effort to bring reform to a government he would hours later compare to Rip Van Winkle had begun.

Despite all his promises and plans, despite all the preaching and speeches, that is also where the effort to reform government effectively ended, said Lawrence Norden, associate counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice. Everything was supposed to change on Day One. After the 442 days Spitzer got, not much had, Norden said.

Spitzer might have been on track to make progress, Norden said. He might not have been. He simply was not in office for enough time to tell.

“It’s like trying to analyze a football game after looking at one quarter,” he said.

That is a kinder analysis than that of others in and around state government. In terms of changing how things really got done, Spitzer accomplished nothing, many said. Some dismissed the possibility that he could have. Some laughed at the very question: in fact, by getting involved in the activities which spawned Troopergate and creating such antagonism in the capital, Spitzer inadvertently set back progress on reform, perhaps irrevocably. Greater transparency and openness, most agree, are at least as far away now as when he first took the oath of office, if not further.

Overall, Eliot Spitzer, to many legislators, is starting to almost seem like an odd blip between George Pataki (R) and David Paterson (D), especially with the budget done and the headlines about Paterson’s own extramarital dalliances faded.

But over 14 months, Spitzer signed dozens of bills into law. Most are just now coming into effect, and are set to shape the legislative landscape and disburse hundreds of millions of dollars for years to come.

Perhaps his biggest accomplishment as governor is the reform of the workers’ compensation law, which had long eluded state leaders. As the chair of the Assembly Labor Committee, Susan John (D-Monroe) was deeply involved in the negotiations. She believes elements of the final law, like the cap on permanent partial disability payments, bear his distinctive mark. But Spitzer’s greatest effect on worker’s compensation reform was that he was able to make it happen at all, John said.

Convinced by conversations on the campaign trail that the issue desperately needed to be tackled, Spitzer met with Business Council president Ken Adams and AFL-CIO president Denis Hughes to begin the process the day after he won. The next day, he met with John. He insisted he could get an agreement even before he negotiated his first budget.

He was being overly optimistic, she told him. He could not get a deal done that quickly.

But he did, even with the first few weeks of the year lost in his fury over the battle to select a new comptroller. The law, signed March 13, 2007, increased benefits for injured workers while reducing employer costs by between 10 and 15 percent, and became the first major legislative victory of his time as governor. Day 72: workers’ compensation in New York changed.

The size of his 2006 election win and the comfort many unions felt with having a Democratic governor take the lead on the issue enabled him to corral them and the various business interests toward resolution, John explained. Had he not gotten entangled in the scandals and struggles that marked so much of his abbreviated term, he would have been able to unlock other impasses in the same way.

“There was a lot of desire to get an agreement, it was just nobody was willing to expend the effort or the political capital. And Eliot was saying, ‘Okay, I can make some compromises and I can encourage these folks to make some compromises,’” John said.

Civil confinement, negotiated simultaneously and signed into law the next day, helped move some of the resistant legislators toward passing workers’ compensation. After 13 years of debate, on Day 73, the government transformed the lives of sex offenders in New York, extending their mandated treatment and monitoring during and after their prison sentences.

Even as he negotiated his first budget, Spitzer had managed to dispose of two issues that had stymied state leaders for years. But whether these actually make substantive differences in the lives of New Yorkers cannot yet be known, said Assembly Member Brian Kolb (R-Seneca/Ontario).

“Even now as we’re progressing through the worker’s compensation review, some companies have seen some savings, some have not seen any at all,” Kolb said. “The test of that bill is not about getting done, but whether it delivered the results that were promised.”

The same is true of civil confinement, Kolb believes.

“An accomplishment is only an accomplishment if we are able to say ‘This is where we were,’ ‘This is where we are,’—‘How do we compare?’” Kolb said. “You have to give it a little time for it to work or not work.”

Whatever the ultimate outcomes, Kolb said that Spitzer’s very approach to the negotiations had transformed life in the Capitol. By cutting through the rhetoric on either side of the debate in favor of a focus on the facts and figures involved, Kolb said Spitzer had distinguished himself from other Albany leaders. If others follow Spitzer’s example on this, that will be his lasting effect.

After all, Kolb pointed out, there was not much else Spitzer got done at all.

Spitzer sliced through another tangle to get the human trafficking law passed in June, moving the Senate to action and getting the Assembly to pass a bill which survived in conference committee. The law he signed in early June catapulted New York past most of the country in the extent to which the state now addresses both sex and labor trafficking. Ironic in hindsight given what ended his career—that was Day 157.

Going into the end of session last June, there was a lot more he wanted to get done. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s congestion pricing plan was on the table for the first time, as was an extensive campaign finance reform proposal, which Spitzer was adamant about getting enacted. Legislators wanted pay raises. Others wanted to expand DNA collection from criminals, renew Article X at long last and extend paid medical leave for workers.

As always, there were negotiations behind closed doors until the last minute. Everyone speculated about what would be part of the final deal.

In the end, they got a simple answer: nothing. The Legislature went home, and though the Senate returned for two brief meeting over the course of the year, what would turn out to be Spitzer’s only full session had ended in a succession of stalemates.

That was Day 172.

Spitzer’s unwillingness to budge on his campaign finance reform proposals torpedoed everything else. Given how soon afterward he resigned, that stubbornness is ultimately what kept him from having much of a lasting legacy, said Kenneth Shapiro, a former counsel to three Assembly speakers and now a principal at the Wilson, Elser, Moskowitz, Edelman & Dicker LLP lobbying firm.

“Yeah, he might have negotiated out a budget,” Shapiro said, “but when you look to see what happened at the end of the session last year, they had a lot of agreements, but nothing got done.”

Troopergate broke two weeks later, Day 186

All summer long, Spitzer was active and signing bills, though with Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno (R-Rensselaer) successfully casting himself as a victim of a political hit job in the media, not many people were paying attention—even when Spitzer became one of the first and most prominent elected officials in the country to address the sub-prime mortgage crisis or spearheaded the call for President George W. Bush to sign an expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.
Meanwhile, he increased the revenue of the state’s Environmental Protection Fund by $25 million for the 2008-2009 fiscal year, and to $300 million for every year after. By what would have been the end of his term in 2010, $175 million more will have gone to the fund.

In August, he signed a bill radically redefining the relationship between managed health care plans and patients, doctors and hospitals, limiting the ability of any health plan to rescind payment for previously approved treatments and putting in several measures to increase the transparency and simplicity of the system.

The next day, with Bloomberg, he created a local child care tax credit that is estimated to put more money in the hands of 49,000 low-income New York families, and two weeks later signed a law which will eventually pour tens of millions of dollars into funding increased shelter allowances provided for families on public assistance living in public housing.

Three weeks later, he signed a bill to give rape victims access to the medical information of their attackers, revamped the process by which parents can protest their disabled children’s assignment of special services in public schools, and broadened what counts as discrimination against the disabled across the state. He approved contracts for low-cost hydro-power to go to Western New York and signed a law reducing school bus idling across the state.

Small steps, most agree, some of them more important than others, and not much that was the result of his leadership either in negotiating or presenting program bills. There were no more breakthrough bargains, and with campaign finance reform scuttled on the rocks of his own rhetoric, he had no signature policy to push for, no case he could go before the public and prosecute.

Giving driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, he seemed to think, would give him that big issue. Two months were consumed by his railing and berating, though more serious consideration was given to whether Sen. Hillary Clinton (D) approved than whether anyone else in New York government did.

Then, as would eventually happen with Spitzer himself, the issue suddenly disappeared. In a microcosm of his time as governor, the proposal generated some fans and many critics, but, most of all, a whirlwind of anger and accusations, before Spitzer abruptly withdrew it. Much like in his resignation speech, he only barely admitted defeat, instead self-righteously trying to direct attention to what might have been.

There are remnants of Spitzer in Albany. Not many. Like his press releases, still posted on the official governor’s website but no longer visible without a web search, though they are reluctant to admit it. The budget was his, mostly. The Wick’s Law deal, too.

Beyond the policy—in the politics, in the atmosphere, in the predictions of what will come next—Spitzer still matters, and will continue to matter.

He reinforced the most negative stereotypes about politicians. American voters always worry that their elected officials are involved with extra-marital sex, subterfuge, criminal activity and hypocrisy. The Spitzer scandal had all of these, rolled into one.

Every other elected official will have to deal with the reverberations, especially in New York. They hope all politics really is local, that people will judge them each on individual merits and see the differences. They fear that people will not, instead conflating them with the Spitzer scandal, complicating relations with their constituents and hurting them at the polls.

And thinking back to her own experience coming of age during Watergate, State Sen. Liz Krueger (D-Manhattan) worried that the farthest-reaching effect of Spitzer will be disillusioning the best and brightest about getting involved in the first place.

“Lots of good people chose not to go into politics because we had that bad taste in our mouth because of Richard Nixon,” she said. “Any of these events potentially set a number of young people away from ever imagining they want to go into government and politics. And that means their generation pays a huge price, at the end of the day.”

Whether New Yorkers will ever believe in another self-styled crusader remains to be seen. In a society cynical about politics and politicians, Spitzer’s downfall may drain more out of an already shallow reservoir of trust.

Someone will have to step forward, said State Sen. José Serrano (D-Manhattan/Bronx). The 3,860,709 New Yorkers who voted for Spitzer and his platform will demand it.

“When you look at Governor Spitzer’s legacy, it’s so easy to look at how horrible things turned out, but you can’t sponge away the fact that an overwhelming majority of voters gave Eliot Spitzer a mandate to reform Albany,” Serrano said. “You can’t discount that. So many folks were behind and rooting for Eliot Spitzer.”
The scandal might even intensify the calls for reform.

And despite how Spitzer’s political career ended, his 14 months was enough time to help shake up the way people think about state government, said State Sen. Eric Schneiderman (D-Manhattan/Bronx).

Going forward, those in the state government will have no choice but to follow Spitzer’s example in not just trying to tackle the often-avoided big issues, but attempting to craft holistic solutions instead of tinkering around the edges.

“What changed was the attitude,” Schneiderman said. “Eliot is gone, but I don’t think anyone thinks that we can go back to business as usual.”

Upstate advocates are particularly concerned about how thoroughly Paterson will adopt Spitzer’s commitment to upstate revitalization. Aside from that, though, the new governor is expected to keep on most of Spitzer’s commissioners and pick up on most of Spitzer’s policies, though perhaps shifting the emphasis on some as he integrates his own agenda into the administration’s goals.

Neither Paterson nor any successor for a very long time will make the mistake Spitzer did and fill administration posts with people inexperienced in the ways of Albany. Conciliation and collaboration from the executive will take on a greater value than ever in Spitzer’s wake, everyone seems to agree.

Paterson undoubtedly understands this, having learned from his own two decades in the State Senate and by counterexample during Spitzer’s troubled 442 days. That will help him realize whatever leftover Spitzer priorities he decides to pursue.

In other words, the Spitzer agenda might fare better without Spitzer promoting it, said Amy Traub, director of research for the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, a progressive think tank which supports most of what Spitzer proposed.

“I do think there’s tremendous popular support for this agenda, so I would hope that Paterson would be more effective than Spitzer in carrying it out,” she said. “Spitzer really set the agenda, and certainly Governor Paterson has an opportunity to add a lot to it.”

Craig Johnson (D-Nassau) owes his Senate seat in large part to Spitzer, as does Darrel Aubertine. George Amedore (R-Montgomery/Schenectady) and Micah Kellner (D-Manhattan) would not be in the Assembly without the openings Spitzer created by administration appointments—or at least not yet.

That may be the most concrete change he brought to the Capitol.

“It’s hard to imagine the governor’s legacy is going to be much broader than his exit,” said Weprin, the Queens Assembly member.

And if he does have any lasting impact at all, it will not be from anything that happened on Day One or since, said Joseph Zimmerman, a professor at Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy and a longtime observer of state politics. His effect on the financial sector through his investigations and prosecutions of Wall Street firms while attorney general, though, will continue to matter, both in New York and across the nation.

“That will be his big legacy: that he was an aggressive attorney general, and went after some large firms that generally have not been subject to being monitored by state government,” Zimmerman said. “But when you come to his role as governor, I suppose the only memory people will have, other than the scandal, is the fact that he tried to be a bulldozer.”

People who underestimate Spitzer’s legacy are wrong, said John, the Monroe Assembly member. But it is not their fault: as after any loss, she said, they are still working through the stages of grief. Having gotten past Denial, Anger and Bargaining, they are only up to number four: Depression.

She, though, seems to be all the way through to number five: Acceptance. And part of that is understanding that for good and for bad, Spitzer will have a long, strong shadow cast over Albany and New Yorkers for years to come.

“There’s a lot of reasons why people want it to be forgotten about, but I do think that that’s people engaging in wishful thinking. This was such an extraordinary episode in state history, both because of the man involved and because of the almost Greek mythical tragedy of his exit from office, that it will not be forgotten,” John said. “And I think that for many years, there will be more senior politicians saying to more junior politicians ‘Remember the lessons of Eliot Spitzer and don’t reach for more than you can grab.’”