The City Politic

Add Comment

Spitzer on a Rampage

How he keeps doing it, however, is subject to improvisation. Though his enemies are trying to caricature Spitzer as a one-note rage-aholic bully, the governor is freelancing to a degree that surprises, and sometimes unnerves, even his allies. “There’s a bit of play-as-you-go with Eliot,” one administration official says. “I’m not so sure the rationale has been completely determined on all these things … Is this going to be scorched earth, or is this take a couple of villages, send the message, and then regroup? Eliot hasn’t decided yet.”

The effects, however, are obvious: Legislators are freaking out. Previously anonymous members are suddenly in a glaring spotlight, thanks to Spitzer’s blasts (“I’ve always wanted New York Magazine to call me!” one assemblyman shrieked to me last week). They’re also being bombarded by calls and e-mails from constituents mad about the comptroller maneuverings. Legislators are alarmed, and very suspicious that Spitzer is coordinating the hostility. “Legislators may not like the methods,” says Lieutenant Governor David Paterson. “But they’re getting the message the public is paying attention.”

“Nixon once said it’s helpful when your opponents think you’re crazy,” says an Assembly member who has been on the receiving end of Spitzer’s venom. “But Eliot’s outbursts have all the airs of spontaneity when you hear them. He can’t help himself, but then he rationalizes it as a tactic … This is not about reform; it’s about power.”

Well, yeah. Spitzer’s closest colleagues see no reason for him to lower the volume, and say his outbursts are both emotionally sincere and entirely premeditated. “Eliot knows exactly what he’s saying when he’s saying it,” says Lloyd Constantine, a lawyer and Spitzer mentor who’s signed on as the governor’s senior adviser. “I’ve never seen a person more in command of himself.” And even as he’s been ranting in public, Spitzer has been playing a subtler hand, holding private meetings with legislators who, in the twelve years of George Pataki’s reign, rarely got an audience with the governor (though even some of these Spitzer chats, like a session with Democratic assemblywoman Cathy Nolan of Queens, have degenerated into bickering). The next move in this game of psychological warfare will be stroking legislators. “There are different pressure points,” the governor says. “The most I can say is that everybody wants to be Teddy Roosevelt, and I’ve used that metaphor. But there are also times to be Lyndon Johnson, who knew how to get things done.” Blunter tools are also being discussed, including TV ads to counter an expected blitz by the health-care unions, which oppose Spitzer’s budget. “Eliot fights fire with fire,” says a senior Spitzer strategist.

Spitzer is also trying to exploit a fascinating paradox: Uniting to elect a comptroller has emboldened individual legislators to strike out on their own. They’re freshly puffed up with a determination to prove that they’re smart, too, and they’re bitter, especially on the Assembly side, that Sheldon Silver hasn’t protected them better in public when they’ve been bashed as the most dysfunctional legislature known to man.

“Shelly’s never been able to go outside and craft a message that made the public understand what we were doing,” an upstate assemblyman says. “Look, he’s a superb negotiator, and we were always satisfied to win the negotiation and lose the press release. Turns out we were wrong. There’s been a cumulative impact. He was nowhere in the press today defending his members. I don’t think he knows what to do.” In this environment, even the previously unthinkable—that Silver could be toppled as Speaker—has become plausible. “Part of the equation is Shelly’s performance,” an Assembly member says. “The danger for him is that the same forces Shelly used to control the comptroller race—county leaders like Vito Lopez in Brooklyn and Joe Crowley in Queens—will try to come in and control the Speaker race.”

There isn’t any Speaker’s race—at the moment, anyway. The governor would be satisfied to loosen Silver’s grip on the Assembly and to shift the Senate majority to the Democrats before November 2008. “There are levels at which everything is following the course we had gamed out,” Spitzer says, “and there’s twists and turns that are new. That’s what makes it exciting.” Yet stoking public anger and turning legislators into relatively free agents is easy compared with reaping the whirlwind he’s unleashing.

E-mail: chris_smith@nymag.com.