Blame Pataki. Will a Big Apple convention be a GOP mistake?
BY VINCENT J. CANNATO
Wednesday, May 7, 2003 12:01 a.m.
This is more about the fiscal mess New York City and State are in than the convention. The only downside I see to having it there is that it makes it easy for the left to turn out demonstrators.
When the plan was announced to hold the 2004 Republican Convention in New York City, it seemed like a good idea. After all, the city is thought to be the heart of American liberalism, but a Republican governor and a Republican mayor would host the party--a jab at those who squawk about the GOP's increasingly Southern base. Most important, President Bush would return to New York where, in September 2001, he promised that those who destroyed the World Trade Center and killed nearly 3,000 people would pay dearly for it.
But New York political theater now threatens to put a damper on what once seemed an inspired choice for the convention. New York state faces a roughly $12 billion budget shortfall. The state Legislature--a Republican-led Senate and a Democratic-led Assembly--has just passed a budget deal that would raise city and state income and sales taxes, add billions in debt, and leave spending relatively untouched. Mayor Mike Bloomberg has given his support to the deal, hoping that it will allow him to cover his own budget deficit in the city.
Gov. George Pataki has condemned the deal, breaking with his former allies in the Republican state Senate. He argues that the tax hike will help kill the economic recovery. He vetoed the bill, but the Legislature appears to have the votes to override him. Mr. Pataki's words sound good, but folks aren't buying his deathbed conversion to fiscal prudence. To many, it appears he is trying to ingratiate himself with Washington Republicans while distancing himself from responsibility for the crisis.
Calling Mr. Pataki "The Governor Who Gave Away the State," The Economist recently argued that he "may have remembered virtue too late." Nor have conservatives come to the governor's defense. Former Pataki appointee to the Port Authority, George Marlin--on the New York Times op-ed page of all places--recently ripped his former patron for abandoning his political principles and joining the ranks of what Mr. Marlin, a prominent member of the New York Conservative Party, calls the Albany "incumbocrats." These politicians, according to Mr. Marlin, use "fiscal sleight of hand . . . all the while increasing spending, taxes and pork and pandering to special interests."
It wasn't always like that. Mr. Pataki began his Albany career by defeating a liberal Republican in the primary to win a state Senate seat. There he proceeded to be an often lone voice against the budgets of Mario Cuomo. Mr. Pataki's victory against Mr. Cuomo in 1994 was supposed to usher in a new political era of fiscal conservatism, a final repudiation of Cuomo liberalism and Rockefeller Republicanism.
Mr. Pataki set out cutting taxes and holding the line on spending. The boom years of the 1990s, though, ended such restraint, and Mr. Pataki's budget spending began to grow far in excess of inflation. During last year's re-election campaign, Mr. Pataki was using the old Rockefeller trick of buying off union support in return for political endorsements (or neutrality). Liberal journalist Sydney Schanberg, writing in the Village Voice, scores Mr. Pataki for spending money "like a tipsy sailor, handing out election-year goodies all over the state."
The present budget mess recalls the fiscal crisis that hit New York during the mid-1970s and helped undermine both Rockefeller Republicanism and the fiscal policies of New York City liberals. It exposed the questionable use of excess borrowing by the state and city, as well as spending priorities that far outpaced any realistic estimate of revenues. But it was Democratic governor Hugh Carey who finally convinced the state and city to bite the bullet and enforced fiscal discipline. Unions even granted important concessions to stave off insolvency.
You would think that New York Republicans today would step up and take a similar stand. Yet nobody seems to be rising to the occasion.
Why not? Historian Fred Siegel puts his finger on a big part of the problem. "There is a disconnect between the politics of New York and the private-sector economy," he explains. The most powerful voices in Albany are not those that represent the private sector or fiscal restraint, but rather what the Manhattan Institute's E.J. McMahon calls "the iron triangle of public-sector union bosses, subsidy-dependent hospitals, and gilt-edged public schools." Spending on public schools and hospitals goes up, but quality doesn't. Unions get wage and benefit increases, but without productivity gains.
This trend does not bode well for Republicans. Though it might appear that with a Republican mayor and governor (as well as an insanely popular Rudy Giuliani) the party is making inroads in this most liberal of Northeastern states, the reality is more stark.
Formerly Republican suburbs like Westchester County have gradually moved into the Democratic column. Gross fiscal mismanagement in Nassau County destroyed the once-powerful Republican machine there, leaving the county in Democratic hands. Democrats now hold a majority of Long Island's congressional seats.
Republican candidates--conservative and liberal--used to be able to rely on upstate Republican votes to balance out overwhelmingly Democratic New York City. But as the upstate economy continues to stall, Republicans are even losing their grip there. Just look at Hillary Clinton's strong showing upstate in her 2000 Senate race.
The state's budget problems will only worsen these electoral trends for Republicans. If you can't trust Republicans to balance the books, then why vote for them?
Worse yet, it remains unclear whether the New York economy--state and city--will fully recover, even if the national economy picks up steam. That promises to make next year's budget battle just as ugly as the current mess.
Instead of drawing the spotlight on an ascendant New York Republican Party, the convention might end up revealing that the policies of Rockefeller and Mr. Cuomo are still very much alive in the Empire State.
Next year, as New York prepares for the convention, there is a good chance the state and city will also have to deal with another round of budget deficits. There could be more ugly battles among the governor, mayor and state Legislature over who is to blame and how to cover the shortfall, more talk about taxes and less about spending cuts, as well as loud protests by labor unions eager to embarrass Republicans.
President Bush deserves a triumphant convention where he can play up his successes as commander in chief. But if current trends continue, the national Republican Party might end up with more than it bargained for when its delegates hit the Big Apple in 2004.
Mr. Cannato, author of "The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York" (Basic Books, 2001), is an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute. |
